The Pagan Agenda

Rating:

On average I tend to see two very good films each year at the film festival, and this year I have already made that quota and there is still half the festival to go through. The two films to make my list are the aforementioned ‘Paradise Now’ and ‘Tristram Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story’.

Last night I saw the World Premiere of ‘Tristram Shandy’. I had toyed with the idea of reading the eighteenth century novel the film (or at least the title) is based on but it exceeded my three hundred page rule, and so I went into the film completely ignorant of the story, which, with the many asides made by the characters in the film seems to be largely the point for making the movie. Steve Coogan, playing himself and Tristram Shandy, and Tristram’s father, expressed it best in a scene where he is being interviewed: ‘Tristram Shandy was post-modern before there was anything modern to be post about’. In this respect the very fabric of the novel may be treated as a precursor to Seinfeld, a lot of talk about nothing and finding the humor in that. And what better way for director Michael Winterbottom to convey this elevation of frivolity than by sending up the whole creative process in making a movie of the book by engendering in part a mockumentary that plays off the parallel absurdity of both the content of the book and the modern day creative process.

But while there are definitely associations to be made with ‘This is Spinal Tap’ it seems imprecise to merely label this film a mockumentary. There is so much detail crammed into this film that you as the viewer are swept away by the tangential nature of the screenplay, not being able to register fully what the hell you are watching as various levels of narrative are thrown before you in accordance to the narrator’s short attention span. A more apt comparison for this film I believe would be Spike Jonze’s ‘Adaptation’ intermixed with Woody Allen’s ‘Love and Death’, in that there is the same kind of vaudevillian pleasure in performance that is evident in Allen’s work yet there is another level of clever maneuvering on the part of the director by using the farcical comedy to allude to serious critiques of both life and the creative process of filmmaking which evokes the works of Kaufmann. There is the act of telling the joke and then after the laugh is got a sort of deconstruction of the joke, something most mockumentaries do not spend time pursuing.

Most of all, ‘Tristram Shandy’ is one of the funniest movies in recent years, I had not laughed so hard in a theater since Chris Smith’s documentary ‘American Movie’ (even ‘Shaun of the Dead’ pales in comparison). The first thirty minutes is an onslaught of comedy that if the entire film had kept that momentum would surely have had me physically drained from laughter by the end. The comedic duo of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are perfection. I have been a huge fan of Steve Coogan’s from listening to his comedy programs on BBC, and there are several in-jokes about his Alan Partridge character on the BBC which I am afraid went over the heads of my fellow Canadians. Also I am not sure how many other people got the joke that Gillian Anderson is British not American yet played herself as an American. It is nuances of comedy like these that nestle in the crevices of this film and probably need several viewings to entirely grasp. For both sheer enjoyment value and post-mod cred I have to say that this film is greater than ‘Adaptation’, and to be confident enough to assume a film can top Charlie Kaufmann in cleverness is really saying a lot from me.

now I have to read the book.