Like his hero Sterne, Winterbottom wants to show us that this big, sprawling, messy thing we call life can’t, for the sake of art, be tidied up into neat chapters, coherent characters and clear divisions between fact and fiction. Consequently, his film is a messy, wandering, mutating thing.
It begins with Tristram Shandy (Steve Coogan) announcing that he is going to tell us the story of his life. He starts with his birth — and here Coogan tells us he’s also playing his father, Walter. Then he digresses. And digresses within his digression. What follows is like watching a shaggy-dog story give birth to a litter of shaggy pups. We meet Uncle Toby (Rob Brydon) and hear the tale of how he was wounded in the private parts at the siege of Namur. We also learn that Tristram was wounded in his private parts, too, when a window fell on his you-know-what. In between, there’s plenty of what is called “bawdy humour”, a posh term for dumb jokes delivered in period costume.
This opening section is the least successful part of the film. There’s too much whimsy and not enough wit. The sequence involving Tristram’s birth — which is conducted with much authentic screaming by his mother (Keeley Hawes) — seems to drag on for ever.
I suspect that, at this point, Winterbottom realised nobody is really interested in seeing British comedians romping around in period costume, doing a book nobody outside of university reads any more. It’s so typical of an Oxbridge boy like Winterbottom that to do a postmodern film that is all about the fluidity of narrative, he has to resort to a literary classic for authority. By contrast, an American screenwriter such as Charlie Kaufman — who tackled a similar subject in Adaptation — takes a contemporary work of non-fiction as his source material; he doesn’t have to borrow prestigious literature for his work.
Having dumped Sterne’s book, the film then becomes a film about the making of the film, and Coogan switches roles and becomes the “real” Steve Coogan. Take note of those quotation marks. The whole film exists within quotation marks. There are so many self-referential gags, so many postmodern tricks on display, that even the quotation marks have quotation marks. Okay, it was pretty original when Sterne did it in 1767, but postmodern playfulness has been done to death since then. Anyway, Coogan’s fictional lover (Kelly MacDonald) and six-month-old baby turn up, as does a tabloid journalist, Gary (Kieran O’Brien), who is about to break a story about Coogan’s involvement with a lap dancer — which actually happened to the real Coogan (no quotation marks).
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For all the film’s narrative daring and use of sensitive personal facts, the result is something rather nice and cosy. It’s as if all these comedians are queuing up to show that they can laugh at themselves. As an insider’s look at the hidden life on a film set, however, Winterbottom’s film is disappointing. Essentially, he is showing us that film sets are boiling cauldrons of gossip, deceit and raging egos. (No, really?) At the centre of this story is the playground competitiveness between Coogan and Brydon. There’s a running gag about Coogan wanting his heels to be adjusted so that he looks taller than Brydon. It’s not funny, because it doesn’t ring true. It’s the sort of joke that would work with an A-list star like Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis, not small-screen British comedians with bad teeth.
The film is potentially at its most disturbing when it plays on the thin line between the real and fictional Coogans. The trouble is that Coogan is least convincing when playing himself. He reacts to threats of tabloid revelations like a man who has been through it all before. We get a real, embarrassing fact, but no feelings. He may be the big name in this film, but he ends up as the straight man to the funnier Brydon, who is a better character actor. Out of character, you suspect, he doesn’t have any character or much in the way of personality.
Unfortunately, A Cock and Bull Story isn’t as funny as you would expect. For me, the best gag comes when the end credits roll, and we see Coogan and Brydon competing to see who does the best Al Pacino imitation. Even though I have my reservations, I admire Winterbottom for having the guts to make a film like this. It has a Terry Gilliam quixotism to it. Yes, it’s self-indulgent and a bit daft, but a failure worth making.
A Cock and Bull Story, Three stars
15, 95 mins