Truth twenty-four time a second #3: Tristram Shandy, a Cock and Bull Story

Sorry for the bait and switch, but Cheif Illiniwek will have to wait another day, since explaining myself on why people put too much faith in symbols vs. concrete effects and rights instead of moral obligations. Instead, a film review will have to suffice for tonight. Tristram Shandy is, among other things, one of the greatest books of all time, the second great English novel (after Samuel Richardson's Clarissa), the second post-modern novel ever written (after Don Quixote), and the book I am currently re-reading for my book club. For those who are interested, I have already written a short review fo the novel, but a longer one will follow here when I finish going over it again. Anyway, enough of the tangents, on with the review.

TS: a C+B Story is a movie about making a movie about a book about everything except what it is ostensibly about (the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman). It's been said that the book is essentially unfilmable, as it consists almost exclusively of tangents and meta-commentary and long anecdotes having nothing to do with what would be the plot of the novel, if it actually had a plot, which it doesn't. Thus, the meta-move idea is perfect. Even if the book is unfilmable, you can still make a film about making a film, with the actors playing actors (I would suggest "All the world's a stage" here, but Yorick is the Shakespearean reference that Laurence Sterne preferred). I wonder how much of the book's humor would be lost on someone who just saw the film; they try to explain things, but much of the humor requires several chapters to set up in the book, and there just isn't time. Thus, Dr. Slop's Catholicism and Uncle Toby's tics that force him to whistle rather than express conflicting opinions are glossed over, chestnuts for the enterprising viewers who have previously read the book (that itself was a chestnut for the readers, though the heat of said chestnut may be debated). Still, the movie is constantly funny throughout, both as a satire of the moviemaking process as well a reasonably faithful retelling of many of TS's most humorous set pieces, and that is an achievement in itself.

Oddly enough, this is the second consecutive time that an indirect movie has been made out of an early post-modern classic, though this one was intentionally so, whereas Lost in La Mancha, the story of Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to shoot Don Quixote, was simply the best that could be made out of a very bad situation. In many ways, I think it would make the original authors very happy. Both Cervantes and Sterne were vastly ahead of their time, and both realized that a novel is an author's form of commenting on anything he wants, including the novel itself. That this is expressed in movie form, by commenting on the movie making process as it relates to filming a book (especially a book about itself), is only fitting.