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: 2/25/2006 | Released: 1/26/2006 | Score: B

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