Director: Michael Winterbottom
Stars: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Naomie Harris, Dylan Moran, Jeremy Northam, Kelly MacDonald, Gillian Anderson, James Fleet and Stephen Fry.
A Cock and Bull Story is the attempt by Michael Winterbottom to film the said to be unfilmable novel of Tristram Shandy’s life. So the question is how to do you film and unfilmable novel? The answer is – you don’t. Instead, you take the main theme of the book and show it through digressions and interruptions. The film begins backstage, where Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon talk about their roles. Then the film begins, but quickly slips back into the fiction of making the movie where we follow Coogan as he has to deal with his girlfriend and newborn baby, interviews, ramblings about the philosophy of films and shoes that aren’t high enough.
I’ve been a fan of Steve Coogan for a long time, and after having watched The Trip and The Trip to Italy, where he and Rob Brydon eat at restaurants and try to outdo each other at impressions, I was pleased at finding this film (and it was great when the Al Pacino and Roger Moore impressions come out). It’s very meta and is totally British. I think you have to appreciate British comedy in order to enjoy the film. I haven’t read the book, but from the film I get the impression that it joyously goes off in tangents, which the film does as well. Coogan walks about, being pulled in a hundred different directions and it’s hilarious.
Stephen Fry only has a small part, but in it he expresses the theme of the book when he says that life is too amorphous to be confined in art, and this shows in the film. The constant cutaways, interruptions, and unsteady narrative are all true-to-life. I can see some people thinking that it’s simply a weird film, but I enjoyed it a lot. It’s very clever and wry, and fans of British comedy will see many familiar faces.
