Video Americain

Review

Recursive and self-referential, yet precocious and poignant, Michael Winterbottom’s lighthearted adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s mid-coital tale The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy succeeds in interpreting Tristram Shandy’s life through a combination of behind-the-scenes experiences and making-of documentary filmmaking. Winterbottom undertakes a spellbinding film essay on the creative process and the hectic abandon that fuels it as told by Steve Coogan in the persons of Tristram, Tristram’s father Walter and himself.

In the course of the film, Coogan’s life is made to imitate art. As Winterbottom peels away his star’s on and off-screen identities to lay bare his fragile ego, Shandy’s own narrative excursions seem sensible, if not necessary, by comparison. Coogan’s every recrimination makes life’s larger concerns farcical; his every rationalization requires its own explanation, which in turn makes any attempt to begin the story seem more absurd, frivolous and hilarious than the one preceding it. As Coogan’s story unravels, Sterne’s unwillingness to yield to conventional storytelling becomes clearer, and Winterbottom’s navel gazing deconstructions and crippling reflexivity likely come closer to reality than one might otherwise admit.

 -- J.T. Ramsay