Plot

While making a movie based on Laurence Sterne’s essentially unfilmable 18th century novel ‘The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’, actor Steve Coogan (Coogan) and the crew have one or two problems…

Review

Okay, get your head round this one. A Cock And Bull Story is a movie within a movie. Actually, it’s more a movie about a film crew making a movie. To confuse matters further, there’s narration to camera and a few dream sequences dotted throughout. And, to make things even worse, many will be expecting the result to be an out-and-out comedy – which it’s not.

Instead, Michael Winterbottom’s strange mockumentary works best as a behind-the-scenes look at how farcical making a motion picture can be. For most of the running time, we see Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon and a few others gamely playing loose versions of themselves on the set of their fictional film as the crew deals with re-writes, budget cuts and giant prop wombs. Co-scripted with Winterbottom’s usual writing partner Frank Cottrell Boyce (using the joint pseudonym Martin Hardy), it’s impressively clever and admirably self-aware (describing the book as postmodern before there was anything modern to be post about), yet sadly it’s hard to imagine mainstream audiences ‘getting’ much of it.

Inventive and different, A Cock And Bull Story is certainly an acquired taste, full of ambitious meta-layers and literary in-jokes that will sadly fly over most viewer’s heads. Flitting back and forth between the movie being made and actual scenes from it, it’s initially tricky to get a handle on these multiple levels of reality, while there’s too much footage from the ‘movie’ itself. It’s just dead screen time. Happily though, the majority of time is spent following the crew as they try to bring this unfilmable novel to life, which gives us both an accurate portrayal of the movie-making process and the real reason for watching…

Which is, undoubtedly, Coogan and Brydon portraying ‘themselves’, sportingly poking fun at their personas as we perceive them. Coogan, of course, as the insecure and overly-ambitious wannabe A-lister, unable to escape the shadow of Alan Partridge and with a wandering eye for the ladies. Brydon, who ironically comes close to pinching the movie, as the permanent comedian who never shuts up in his never-ending search for laughs (which frustrates Coogan who occasionally wants to be left alone). Unexpectedly, this semi-fictional angle also leads to some genuine moments of poignancy, which are more affecting than you might imagine.

Best of all though is the rivalry and one-upmanship between the pair, each afraid the other will get the laughs and walk away with the fictional movie. As real-life friends, they’ve got an easy, natural chemistry together and know each other’s beats, amusingly improvising jabs back and forth while brilliantly competing about who’s taller, better at impressions, the real star… and so on. Elsewhere, it’s like a spot-the-recognisable-face game, with the likes of Kelly Macdonald, Dylan Moran, Shirley Henderson, Keeley Hawes, Ian Hart, Jeremy Northam, James Fleet, Greg Wise and Ronni Ancona playing the supporting players, while Stephen Fry and Gillian Anderson also plays themselves.

Verdict

An ambitious meta-movie about a film-within-a-film, A Cock And Bull Story is clever, different and self-aware, but it’s hard to imagine it finding much of an audience.