I got the feeling while watching this movie that the filmmakers were doing something brilliant but that it was going over my head because—as is so often the case—I wasn't familiar with the source material. Having had a few days to do a little digging, I think I was right. What the writer and director has done here is take a book that is widely regarded to be unfilmable (Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman) and restructured it in such a way that it works brilliantly on film. Rather than try to put the novel on film, what they've done is captured the spirit of the novel by making a movie about making a movie about the novel. (Is your head spinning yet?) The book is described as a self-reflexive, stream-of-consciousness satire full of both low-brow bawdy and more intellectual, meta-literary humor that still manages to ask some serious questions about the limits of self-knowledge and deliver some touching scenes of paternal love. And that's exactly what you get from the movie. The more I think about it, the more I like it. Now, to go get myself a copy of the book.

Viewed: 2006-02-25 | Released: 2006-01-26 | Score: B

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