Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (**)

A farcical “making of” documentary about the nonexistent movie version of a classic novel. Star Steve Coogan is likeable and often funny, but the concept quickly wears thin.

This movie bears a bit of explaining. The short version is, it’s a fake “making of” documentary about a movie that wasn’t actually made. We see parts of that movie, an adaptation of the “unfilmable” 18th-century (real) literary classic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. In these scenes, Steve Coogan plays the title character (and his father). Like his counterpart in the novel, Coogan as Shandy narrates his own life. In one funny bit, he disparages the performance of the child actor playing his younger self. But for most of the movie, Coogan plays Coogan. Should you see this film, it will help you to know that in the UK he is well known for playing a fake TV talk-show host called Alan Partridge who has real guests (akin to Martin Short’s Jiminy Glick). Here he’s a fake Steve Coogan in a real movie. (An Alan Partridge movie looms on the horizon.) Other people, such as Yank Gillian Anderson, play themselves too in the mockumentary portion, but others don’t. For instance, Kelly McDonald, as the mother of Coogan’s child, is called Jenny. This all sounds very clever, and it is, even if the funniest scene echoes There’s Something About Mary. If this sounds like your thing, I shouldn’t dissuade you from seeing it. But whenever I saw Coogan acting pompous on screen, I was reminded that it was actually Coogan modestly poking fun at himself, and pretty soon, for me, the lack of a real storyline wore thin.

IMDb link