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 Whereas Manderlay reduces much of life to various schemes, Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A C*ock and Bull Story accepts the facts of accident, chaos, emotion, and impulse, facts the human mind and personality are intrigued and frustrated by, responsive to, and out of which a comedy, as much as a tragedy, might come: and wisdom, too, is a possibility.
Reviewed by Daniel Garrett
I know what some of the members of my generation are doing, and I know a little something about who they are: Paul Begala, Ralph Carter, Joan Chen, Thomas Haden Church, George Clooney, Nadia Comaneci, Douglas Coupland, Dinesh D’Souza, Kim Deal, El DeBarge, Melissa Etheridge, Laurence Fishburne, Wayne Gretzky, Woody Harrelson, Bonnie Hunt, Peter Jackson, K.D. Lang, David Leavitt, Carl Lewis, Wynton Marsalis, Chi McBride, Dylan McDermott, Christopher Meloni, Isaac Mizrahi, Rick Moody, Jeremy Northam, Barack Obama, Alexander Payne, Scott Ritter, Dennis Rodman, Henry Rollins, Tim Roth, Arundhati Roy, Douglas Rushkoff, Campbell Scott, George Stephanopoulos, Isiah Thomas, Steven Weber, Irvine Welsh, Forest Whitaker, and Michael Winterbottom. Many of us do: as people whose work has achieved some renown, they are allowed not only personal fame but individuality, a measure of freedom and fulfillment. Those of us whose efforts have been less well rewarded (thus far) might feel a certain indifference to the world’s glance and judgment—genuine or cultivated indifference. Of course, as with much else, money makes this indifference easier to achieve; without money, the world often still has the power to irritate and to irritate with little relief. What the world offers many, rather than the freedom of individuality, are socially recognized—if not always socially accepted—false selves: selves rooted in simple notions of purpose, place, and personality, with the responses to one’s public situation being all that is understood as one’s personality; selves that have little to do with one’s own perceptions, philosophy, or private personality. In a word, stereotypes. Think of class, skin, gender, religion, or national origin, accept these as existential facts, as elemental aspects of being, and you need not ever have another independent or honest thought again. What a relief. Lars von Trier’s film Manderlay might trouble your sleep as a nightmare, but it wouldn’t wake you up: Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy might wake you—and might delight you.
Manderlay is politically provocative, but it is not very intellectually stimulating or emotionally satisfying: it displays an America in which slavery still exists on a southern plantation in the 1930s, and suggests a forceful arrogance and immorality in the masters and an unimaginative weakness of will among the slaves. Such a view may go against some of the political views of our time, but it cannot surprise anyone familiar with history as written by W.E.B. DuBois, John Hope Franklin, and Manning Marable. Various states, following the Civil War, were slow about granting or recognizing the rights of former slaves; and various forms of discrimination in most areas of American public life prevailed to make freedom nearly worthless—hence, the need for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The southern sharecropping agricultural system was such that—into the 1960s—there were people who remained slaves in all but name. Such disenfranchisement itself creates a culture of poverty—a culture in which morality and possibility are challenged daily, ruthlessly. It’s hard to be noble when you’re struggling to survive: and yet many achieved an unimpeachable dignity; others did not, and who is to say that you, dear reader, would have done any better? Lars von Trier, the director of Manderlay, did not have to do a lot of inventing to come up with the plot of Manderlay. It’s sickening that many Americans throughout history have pretended to be shocked by various injustices and miseries that go on within the borders of the country, often uncontested by the practice of law. What was disappointing to me about the film was its failure to become a universal allegory—a lesson, an insight, that seems applicable to various societies, to various situations.
The film focuses on Grace and her father’s travels through the United States after their experience in Dogville, the town in which Grace was first befriended then abused before taking revenge. Grace, her father, and his gangsters are stopped in the road by a slave woman who asks their help, to stop the whipping of one of the slave men, Timothy. Bryce Dallas Howard plays Grace, Willem Dafoe her father, Danny Glover plays Wilhem, one of the slave elders, and Isaach De Bankole plays Timothy, who is considered a proud, disciplined man, and Lauren Bacall plays Mam, the plantation master. John Hurt is the narrator. Bryce Dallas Howard was good in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village—there she was sensitive and willful, brave and vulnerable—but here she sometimes lacks conviction or genuine feeling. She seems well-intentioned and sometimes nearly whimsical when she should be—or also be—willful and outraged and then surprised by an overwhelming erotic desire for one of the slave men. Rather than seem driven by her own morality and feelings, she seems like Trier’s puppet. Dafoe is simply not nasty enough—it as if he doesn’t understand the part (one should not doubt that this is a dangerous man, no matter how mannered he is). Glover probably gives the best performance in the film as a man who is intelligent, and cares about his people, but complicit in the running of the plantation. De Bankole’s face is now like an African mask—that interesting, that frightening—and his character has a complexity that fulfills one’s fears. (The actor has a nude scene: he’s in fine muscular form.) Isaach De Bankole was in Claire Devers’s Noir et blanc (Black and White), which was inspired by Tennessee Williams’s short story “The Black Masseur,” and in Claire Denis’s Chocolat, a film of charm and power, and Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, Joe Brewster’s The Keeper, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog and Coffee and Cigarettes, among other films.
Manderlay is interesting in discussing types of social temperament—different categories of personality and mind—and to what extent people fit into or defy those categories. However, it’s clear that while discussing such things, one is paying less attention to the actual details of what makes a person unique. To ask to what extent I fit into a category—what I am—is to limit the discussion to qualities that interest you. To ask who I am is an entirely different question: and involves what interests me. Some people are only seen as a what, as a thing, a concept that is the beginning of many problems, one Manderlay handles efficiently enough, while leaving much to personal consideration. The film fails—fails as drama, fails as philosophy—because it does not allow us to believe that any personality has desires or thoughts that are unpredictable, that are not a given in the social situations we see. If that had been true to life, there would have been no Richard Wright (1908-1960; author of Black Boy, and Native Son)—a poor boy who defied every kind of disadvantage and discouragement to achieve individuality and create work of worth; and so many others would not have existed and excelled—and I would not be able to write these words of disbelief about the film (if social power were all, I would feel compelled to agree to the dreary definitions of others—something one might do in youth, when one is hopeful for community, lonely, but that becomes less likely—and more reprehensible and revolting—in a mature person who knows what the world can and cannot give).
Whereas Manderlay reduces much of life to various schemes, Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A C*ock and Bull Story accepts the facts of accident, chaos, emotion, and impulse, facts the human mind and personality are intrigued and frustrated by, responsive to, and out of which a comedy, as much as a tragedy, might come: and wisdom, too, is a possibility. One wants some order in life, but one can recognize the reality of disorder—and if one has the wit, or the will, one can laugh at it. Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A ***** and Bull Story is a light comedy about an attempt to film Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the film provides intellectual amusement and social observations as it details the filmmaking and competition between two actors who are friends, played by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Coogan and Brydon play themselves as actors involved in the filming of Tristram Shandy, with Coogan playing Tristram and Tristram’s father and Brydon playing Tristram’s Uncle Toby. Coogan has previously appeared often in Britain as a television host named Alan Partridge and in various television productions, and is well known enough in the United Kingdom for his private life to get coverage in the scandal sheets, something alluded to in Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy. Although not well-known in the United States, Coogan has appeared in films whose titles, if not performances, we know: Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, Frank Coraci’s Around the World in 80 Days (with Jackie Chan), and Don Roos’s Happy Endings. (Steve Coogan is scheduled to appear in Sofia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst.) Rob Brydon, who plays Tristram’s Uncle Toby, has been featured on British televison and in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, 24 Hour Party People, and Dave McKean’s (and Neil Gaiman’s) MirrorMask. The rapport of Coogan and Brydon is friendly and teasing, argumentative and mocking.
Coogan in Winterbottom’s film is also juggling his relationship with a visiting girlfriend, Jenny (Kelly Macdonald), who has given birth to their baby, and his flirtation with a film production assistant, (coincidentally named) Jennie, played by Naomie Harris. Harris has appeared in the films Anansi, 28 Days Later, and After the Sunset, and is to be featured in Pirates of the Caribbean and Miami Vice. Harris’s film assistant is one of the few cast or crew members who has read the book, and she is also an articulate admirer of Bresson and Fassbinder, noting Bresson’s depiction of the difficulty of achieving human contact and also conflict in the film Lancelot du Lac, and the spiritual turmoil of a beautiful prostitute in one of Fassbinder’s films. Harris, who was reported to have trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, has been quoted as noticing unbelievable female behavior in some of the films written and directed by men, and as looking forward to more gender parity in filmmaking. Harris, who looks a little like Kimberly Elise (Beloved, Woman Thou Art Loosed), is here a charming, efficient, intense young woman—idiosyncratic. If the conviction and energy of her performance are any indication, I imagine she was pleased with the role. Jeremy Northam, who was in Carrington, Emma, An Ideal Husband, The Golden Bowl, Gosford Park, and other films, often in which he is debonair, is here a casually dressed, hardworking man, Mark, the director of the film within the film. Gillian Anderson has a short but effective cameo as herself and a character from the novel, a woman interested in Brydon’s Toby. The film also contains, in the words of British journalist Phil Kemp “a roll-call of British comic talent…Stephen Fry, Dylan Moran, David Walliams, Mark Williams, Ronni Ancona, Ashley Jensen, James Fleet... the list goes on until it stops” (Megastar.co.uk., accessible online as of February 2, 2006).
Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy was a welcomed delight in England and it is that in America, too: The New York Times’ A.O. Scott has called Michael Winterbottom a man who “lives, breathes and thinks through his camera,” and the film “wily, tongue-in-cheek” and Scott also wrote that Winterbottom kept “a lot of the book’s insouciant, inventive spirit (and some of its best moments). He has also paid loving, knowing tribute to the crazy enterprise of film-making, a torment to those mad enough to pursue it and a delight, at least in this case, for those of us lucky enough to sit and watch” (January 27, 2006). Each of Winterbottom’s films is unique, and this one has production design by John Paul Kelly, and its cinematographer is Marcel Zyskind, and editor Peter Christelis, with costume design by Charlotte Walter and makeup by Marese Langan. The novel’s spirit, according to Richard Corliss in Time magazine (January 30, 2006), “can be caught only in a blithe, brazen adaptation of the sort that director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce have concocted with the aid of game cast members who apply the scalpel of parody to themselves as well as to the material.”
The novel Tristram Shandy is an allusive, fragmented text, an intended biography that seems to offer more information about the family and friends of Tristram than about Tristram—which is to say, that in this instance, Tristram’s thoughts about his family and friends may have made up a large part of his life. The novel, as does the film, covers Tristram’s birth, with the controversy over whether a doctor or midwife would attend, and also Tristram’s accidental circumcision in early childhood. Both book and film feature Tristram’s Uncle Toby’s war experience and battle wound, which seems to have occurred in his private parts, and how his wound is a topic of concern for a woman who becomes infatuated with him. (The novel periodically refers to the male organ, a mocking gesture toward the forbidden.) Famously, the novel contains blank spaces and unfinished stories—and the haphazard quality, something the film replicates, reproduces aspects of both mind and life that make such works particularly refreshing: in a time of disorder, one wants order, and in a time of order, one can relish disorder. The film has an aura of freedom. However there are other things to like in Michael Winterbottom’s film—the details of the rooms in which the filming takes place, the landscape at the end of a day of filming as cast and crew walk to their cars, and the wonderful sense of acceptance at life’s going on that suffuses the entire film. Tristan as a baby, and also Steve Coogan’s cleaning and singing to his baby in the film, are part of that sense: new beginnings.
About the reviewer: Daniel Garrett is a writer of journalism, fiction, poetry, and drama. He wrote for The Reporter, a student newspaper at Baruch College, publishing articles on poet Grace Schulman, a student strike at Medgar Evers College, and a march on Washington; and Garrett is a graduate of the New School for Social Research. Garrett was an intern at Africa Report, and published a review of Spike Lee’s School Daze for The Activist (DSA’s Youth Section Newsletter)—the film review was also printed in Black Film Review. He wrote articles on the visual artists Henry Tanner and Edward Mitchell Bannister for Art & Antiques, and covered environmental justice and other environmental issues for The Audubon Activist. Daniel Garrett’s work has appeared in The African, AIM/America’s Intercultural Magazine, AllAboutJazz.com, AltRap.com, American Book Review, Black American Literature Forum, Changing Men, The City Sun, The Compulsive Reader, Frictionmagazine.com, The Humanist, Hyphen, IdentityTheory.com, Illuminations, Muse-Apprentice-Guild.com, Offscreen.com, Option, PopMatters.com, The Quarterly Black Review of Books, Rain Taxi, Red River Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, TechnologyReports.net, 24FramesPerSecond.com, UnlikelyStories.org, WaxPoetics.com, and World Literature Today.
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