Recommended

A movie about the making of a movie based on a book about the writing of a book, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is a fiendishly clever puzzle, twisting itself in knots until the tension is almost too much to bear. Laurence Sterne's 18th-century novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, is as several of the characters in Michael Winterbottom's free-ranging semi-adaptation take pains to inform us, notoriously unfilmable, a problem that Winterbottom and his co-screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (collectively credited as the pseudonymous Martin Handy) solve by devoting much of the movie to a faux-verite observation on the exigencies of filmmaking.

This is, in the strictest sense, a cheat, like turning in a book report on why you couldn't write your book report. But the movie's self-consciousness isn't evasive—on the contrary, it's revelatory. This isn't the reflexive post-Tarantino tail-chasing that so often substitutes for genuine introspection. Tristram Shandy is a searching, poignant story about the way that little things distract us from the things that really matter: love, family, creativity and self-knowledge. It's also very, very funny.

DUAL DUEL: Tristram (Steve Coogan, right) and his "co-lead" (Rob Brydon) face off.

Part of the magic of Tristram Shandy -- and it is magical, not least because it never strives to seem so—is the way Winterbottom juggles dozens of disparate elements without ever dropping the ball. There's the novel itself, an aggressively discursive mock-autobiography whose author goes off on so many tangents that he hasn't even arrived at his own birth by the time the book ends. There's the frame story, in which Steve Coogan, who plays Tristram as well as his father Walter, and Rob Brydon, cast as Tristram's uncle Toby, play "Steve Coogan" and "Rob Brydon," feuding co-stars whose passive-aggressive battles for screen dominance furnish some of the movie's most wickedly funny exchanges. (interview) Coogan, who played the lead in Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, is a sizable star in his native Britain, but Brydon argues to the cameras that his part is "a featured co-lead," not second banana. "It's 'and Rob Brydon,'" he protests.

Obviously influenced by This Is Spinal Tap, Coogan and Brydon (let's dispense with the quotes, shall we) have no compunctions about making themselves look petty or foolish. Coogan demands that the heels on his shoes be made thicker so that Walter can "dominate" Toby in their scenes together (all for the character, of course), while Brydon draws attention to his classically English teeth. But there's more at stake than kidding movie-star vanity or the chaos of on-set life. The movie is cannily constructed so that most of the bits from Sterne's novel are placed at the beginning, in a half-hour chunk whose back-and-forth jumps become nearly exasperating. When the first "cut!" is yelled, you feel a palpable sense of relief at being returned to the real world, only to recall that it's as chaotic and crazed as Sterne's kaleidoscopic construction.

On the set, Coogan is dogged by a tabloid reporter brandishing details of his tryst with a strip-club dancer and pushing for an interview about the actor's transition to fatherhood. In real life, Coogan is childless (although he does have a reported fondness for strippers), but the addition brings him closer to the character of Walter, whose love for his son is one of the novel's thickest threads. Coogan's girlfriend, Jenny (Kelly Macdonald), is visiting with his newborn son, but he's also tempted by a sultry, cinephile P.A. named—wait for it—Jennie (Naomie Harris). Chances are you're not intended to keep all this straight—Coogan certainly can't—but Tristram Shandy is only confusing when it means to be, which is to say that, although Coogan quips that the novel "was postmodern before there was any modernism to be post- about," the movie's underlying structure is ultimately traditional, almost classical.

In essence, Tristram's dilemma (and also, therefore, Coogan's) is that while we'd like to think of ourselves as leading men and women, existentially self-defined creatures at the center of our own universes, we're all supporting players in a story that ultimately has no protagonist. "I'm Tristram Shandy," Coogan tells the camera in his opening monologue. "The main character in this story. The leading role." But, in fact, the adult Tristram is rarely seen thereafter, and Brydon does indeed keep threatening to take over the movie despite Coogan's scheming to enlarge his role. It's not surprising that such material would catch the astonishingly prolific Winterbottom's fancy. What is surprising is that, although the film within the film has a nominal director (Jeremy Northam), he puts in only a few inconsequential appearances. In this movie, everyone acts, but no one runs the show.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story Directed by Michael Winterbottom A Picturehouse release Opens Friday at Ritz Five