Dir: Michael Winterbottom, UK, 2005, 94 mins
Cast: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson
A Cock and Bull Story film starts off as an unconventional adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s famous 18th century novel Tristram Shandy, with Steve Coogan in the lead and Rob Brydon as his co-star. It finishes up as an ever more elaborate exercise in rug pulling and self reference, featuring Steve Coogan playing ‘himself’ on location for the making of Tristram Shandy the movie. The film becomes an exposè of the machinery of film production and celebrity, exploring ‘Coogan’s’ mid life crisis as he fails to bond with his new born son, flirts with the crew and parries intrusions from journalists.
Despite a witty script and clever improvised scenes between Brydon and Coogan, the focus on the process of filmmaking has an oddly sour taste. There is little love of film evident, little regret at art’s inevitable compromise with commerce. Rather, it just seems like so many stressed poseurs sitting around trying to impress each other or squabbling over ‘issues of status’ like the comparative height of the lead actors’ heels. The only people who actually know or care about films are the crew and at the end even they are revealed as play acting. A Cock and Bull Story becomes so self referential that it develops the air of a prolonged in-joke, pitched only at those media savvy enough to laugh in all the right places. It’s all about whether you’re in the gang. But while Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon et al are the great comedy talents of British television their celebrity personas are not quite visible enough to be amusingly punctured.
The switching from one level of storytelling to another becomes tiring and awkward, leaving some characters stranded in the Tristram Shandy part and others sliding all over the place. It also constantly explains to us, we are treated to a tedious discussion which bludgeons us with the already heavy-handed strand comparing ‘Steve Coogan’s’ uninterest in his new baby with the struggles of Tristram’s father to raise his son. Rather than a subtle exposure of the machine behind the illusion it is like someone insistently tugging at your arm, ‘d’you see what I did? D’you see?’
I wanted to believe that all the irony and post post post modernism was an extension of the novel’s self reference and fractured chronology. Sterne famously included a black page for the death of a character and the novel charted Tristram’s thwarted efforts to write his autobiography amid constant interruption. Perhaps A Cock and Bull Story is an attempt to do for film what Sterne did for the form of the novel. But the novel’s preoccupation with the plasticity of form is here abandoned in favour of a clever clever plot which unfolds in a strictly linear fashion.
The real misfortune of A Cock and Bull Story is not that it is smug or awkward but that it is such a missed opportunity. Many scenes are funny and clever and some of the scripting skilfully exposes the distraction and dilettantish nature of celebrities. However, the wit and observance of human nature of Sterne’s novel in the first part of the film overshadows the dreary celebrity merry-go-round of the second. It must takes nerves of steel not only to attempt to film a notoriously ‘unfilmable’ novel, but to try to top a classic with cheap postmodern irony based on our incidental knowledge of the personal lives of a few current celebrities. When it proves virtually impossible to write a review of a film without a liberal sprinkling of inverted commas we have moved into postmodern overload. If only they had stuck to the book.
Philippa Bradnock
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Lionsgate Home Entertainment have announced the UK Region 2 DVD release of A Cock and Bull Story for 10th July 2006 priced at £19.99.
Extras include:
- Audio commentary with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon
- Complete Tony Wilson interview with Steve Coogan
- Deleted scenes
- Scene extensions
- Behind the scenes footage
- Premiere footage
- Theatrical trailer
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