1999:

directed by Terry Jones
written by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin

Criterion #61.

This may be sacrilege but I think Monty Python’s record albums might be their most satisfying body of work. Or maybe just the TV show scripts themselves. My parents had the published scripts when I was a kid and I read them repeatedly, because certain sketches seemed to me absolutely hilarious. When much later I finally saw the shows, I was dismayed at how slapdash and underrealized they were compared to my imagination. The grimy BBC visuals never really made good on the ultimate promise of this kind of comedy: unchained, unkempt whim. (The animations did, but they stood apart; Gilliam had his own point of view, and the cartoons were there to compensate for the stasis of the sketches.) When the visual works on the TV show, it’s usually only that it embodies the standard dullardry of TV, against which the lunatic content can stand out all the more sharply; it never actually feels like it does justice to that content.

One would imagine that in a feature film, with its higher budget and greater technical flexibility, a visual style could be achieved that would come closer to the free spirit of the comedy. Terry Gilliam’s directorial work certainly heads in this direction. But Life of Brian isn’t a Terry Gilliam movie, it’s a Terry Jones movie. It’s shot rather flatly and often at what feels like an excessive distance from the action, or perhaps just with the wrong lens. It’s all framed rather like the TV show. But unlike on TV, there is nothing for the comedy to stand out against — the film stock and the sets aren’t hackneyed in some way that creates an ironic framework. It looks like a legitimate enough movie, albeit a scrappy and rather amateurish one. There’s nothing particularly funny about that.

In the commentary tracks, it is several times asserted that the camera has been intentionally set back from the action because a wide frame serves comedy: it allows the viewer to see the situation as a whole, and the interactions that make up the comedy, which would be obscured by close-ups and fancier camerawork. I disagree. Watching the movie I kept feeling like I was being ejected from the space: there’s not enough room here for you and the skit at once, so you’ll have to step outside, sorry.

Think of all the popular Saturday Night Live sketches on video that were spun off into failed, unfunny movies on film. I think it’s to do with a difference in social engagement. There’s comedy that calls on the audience’s social sense, and then there’s comedy that functions entirely within a fictional reality. SNL skits are nearly all in the former category. 99% of the entertainment value in, say, those Night at the Roxbury guys is that the performers are being so silly. It’s charismatic, titillating even, for people to be unabashedly silly. But you can only enjoy that charisma and titillation if you’re aware of the social reality of the act of performance, the space and time in which it takes place. On live TV that’s possible. In a film it’s not. Once you put an edit in your film, a cut from one shot to another filmed at a different moment, space and time expand to fill the entire imagination, and the social reality recedes to the horizon. There are no performers here, only a fiction to be enjoyed on its own terms. That left the Night at the Roxbury movie with just the remaining 1% to work with. Good luck, writers!

If Terry Jones were standing in front of me with a cloth wrapped around his head and fake teeth, braying in a stupid nasal falsetto, it might be funny, but not because the character is so amusing (what character?), only because this man is being so brazenly silly. It’s socially funny. This seems to come across on traditional two-camera TV, especially when there’s an audible studio audience to prevent the fourth wall from ever really getting filled in. But on film, such comedy stops being social, and so our response becomes more meta: what’s funny about it now is just that the film is being absurdly childish, that the filmmakers have been so cavalier as to do this instead of something proper. That too can be funny — Steve Martin’s standup generally worked this way. But it’s certainly no longer funny itself that Terry Jones is in nominal drag. (I mean, what else is new?)

I think this accounts for the diminishing returns on the Austin Powers movies. In the first one, the schtick was so unfamiliar that it suggested real characters. You could watch that as a movie, one which took place in an absurd and constantly collapsing world, but a world nonetheless. Whereas in the sequels, one was asked to be amused principally that the performers were being so funny as to dress up and talk this way. That attitude is doomed.

A little more on this. Setting aside A Night at the Roxbury, Will Ferrell has actually repeatedly shown himself able to thread the needle and successfully pull off that kind of social/brazenness comedy even in slick high-budget films, which seems to go against my theory. But I would argue that it’s because Will Ferrell, unlike Mike Myers — but like, say, Bob Hope or Woody Allen or the Marx Brothers or early Steve Martin — is not merely a real live person who gets silly in character, but is in fact an established clown persona with a consistent fictional m.o., and it is the clown character “Will Ferrell” who is funny in movies when he plays transparently stupid make-believe. Whereas Mike Myers is no sort of clown. He’s just Mike Myers, that Canadian guy who pretends to be various different flimsy characters. So when he wants credit for being so uninhibited and goofy as to play at being Fat Bastard or whatever, it just seems kind of sad and needy.

I won’t say that the Pythons ever seem needy, per se. But Terry Jones and Eric Idle and Michael Palin aren’t really clowns. They have no personae. They’re just themselves, having fun. So when they do a ridiculous 10-year-old’s-make-believe “character voice” in a feature film, there is definitely a sense of a comedy gap, at least for me. John Cleese is the closest to having established a clown persona — call this persona “Basil Fawlty,” if you like, or just “John Cleese” — so there is more of a cushion for his broadness. Graham Chapman doesn’t have any clown persona at all — which is to say I have the least sense that I know him — but to my mind, he always came the closest of any of them to actually acting, or at least committing to the material, which is the other way out of the bind. It certainly helps Life of Brian that, of all of them, he’s the lead. Even his brief appearance as throwaway silly lisping character “Biggus Dickus” is more satisfying than a lot of other stuff here. It feels like it seeks actual footing.

Is Life of Brian a satire? Well, mildly, at times, but I think overrated as such. It doesn’t have a cohesive point of view, only a sort of accumulated and diffuse one, which I would characterize as “conventionally irritable about people generally.” This attitude forms a longstanding foundation for British humor and for the meek American types to whom it appeals: “Other people: am I right? And all the difficulties they pose? Don’t get me started!” For something to be a proper satire, it has to do more than just commiserate with the choir.

People tend to remember this movie as consisting of the “followers of Brian” material. But this comprises only three scenes, which run from about minute 50 to minute 70 of the movie. That’s about 20% of the 90 minute runtime. It’s some of the best material in the film. It’s about the only material that has anything to say about religion.

Though in some ways even that’s off the mark. The target of the satire in those scenes isn’t really religious at all; it’s the drive to subordinate oneself, and “groupthink,” which is no more characteristic of religion than of any other sociological phenomenon (including comedy). Brian tells the crowd to think for themselves and they assent in enthusiastic unison. The joke is good but it has little to do with Christianity. Christ never really preached that people should think for themselves, did he? He preached that people should find charity in their hearts. Which frankly is not really what this movie does. The movie cheerfully throws the first stone at a herd of straw men. And that’s fine for comedy, which is allowed to be petty — who doesn’t hate dealing with stupid people, after all? They’re totally infuriating, I agree! — but it’s not really a trenchant critique of anything.

From the commentaries I gather that the writer/performers would happily agree that the satirical target of the movie is people generally, not religion and certainly not the life of Christ. And yet there it is: Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Something to do with something to do with the life of Christ has to be going on here.

Philosophical exercise: watch this fascinating and uncomfortable bit of television history and try to see validity in what the opposition is saying. (It’s really tough! But not impossible.) To my mind, the crux of the debate is in the Christianists’ repeated assertions that they can’t for a moment take seriously the claim that this film isn’t a burlesque of the life of Christ, since it so obviously is. They’re wrong, but you can’t blame them.

Even to a fan, what the movie as a whole unavoidably seems to be saying is that this biblical milieu is a particularly fruitful one for the Monty Python treatment. They have here somehow found a uniquely deserving subject for their trademark exasperated absurdism. This is the blatant subtext.

But it turns out that none of the writers ever really claimed this, at least not explicitly. It emerges from the commentary that the decision to write this movie was actually arrived at only gradually, haphazardly, by the group as a whole, Ouija-style. Discussing the development process, they each say things like “we just got the sense that there was rich, unexplored comedic material here, and that’s what we look for.” But that only shows that the shared impulse was subconscious and uncritical. Buried inside “we just got the sense” are all the ideas and assumptions that confront the viewer.

These are all men for whom religious iconography is completely peripheral to their lives. “Biblical stuff,” to them, is just one more bundle of arbitrary inherited tropes, exactly the sort of thing that is fodder for parody. The provocation of the movie is not so much that it has anything to say; it’s just that it arises cheerfully out of this mindset, which has more to do with their various upbringings than it does with thoughts they have. It’s kind of a generational statement more than a philosophical statement: “This bible stuff really and truly looks like fair game to us,” it says. It doesn’t really say much else. And I think that’s what was actually troubling about it to the older generation — and, incidentally, what remains problematic about it for me as a viewer seeking entertainment — that it is driven by nothing much beyond a desire to shrug off the old anxieties: “Who says we can’t make this movie?” And, sure enough, they can. But what kind of a movie is that?

Nowadays there’s a lot of “ironic racism” as comedy — Sarah Silverman and the like, you know the stuff I mean — the function of which is to cater to the audience’s anxieties about being racist — anxieties that are of course being drummed up constantly these days. A clownish effigy of “racism” is established so that everyone can feel the relief of recognizing that at least they’re not that racist! And then people come to enjoy playacting the clown role, because they associate it with relief and relief makes them giddy. What I don’t like about this phenomenon is that it only has comedic value in relation to the assumed anxiety. If an audience member is comfortable with him/herself, then there’s often no actual humor in it. And that’s what seems to be at work with Life of Brian. The movie only really works if you agree that it was rather naughty to make it.

On the other hand, I do agree: it was rather naughty to make it. And the relevant anxieties persist, even now, even past the age of South Park. And it continues to be valuable for there to be signposts like this movie out there, saying, essentially, “Look how close you can come to blasphemy without doing anything wrong! Even a movie like this is perfectly respectful of Christ and Christianity, so I’m sure anything you say won’t be a problem. Real spirituality is a lot more resilient than that; real things always are. So relax.”

So, y’know, maybe my real problem with the movie just goes back to Terry Jones and the mediocre filmmaking: at times it’s clear that, on the surface, the movie wants to justify itself as being a burlesque of Life of Christ movies, of Hollywood biblical epics and their goofy tropes, just as Holy Grail was a burlesque of medieval adventure cliches. See the Ben Hur title styling above. Properly done, this is quite a different thing from burlesquing Christ himself; only Cecil B. DeMille should take offense. But it simply hasn’t been properly done. The viewer can’t tell the difference because the movie doesn’t look like anything in particular.

I’ve had a hard time writing this entry because I don’t know what I think of this movie.

Ultimately what we have here is a comedy cobbled out of assorted sketch ideas, some of which have a superficial satirical impulse but not a coordinating one, set in a New Testament milieu with very carefully calibrated defiance of convention but to no particular greater purpose… and all presented slightly flat, owing to insensitivity to the film medium. A bunch of the sketch ideas are good. A bunch are just middling.

For all these reasons, for my part, I think Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a much funnier and more satisfying movie. Much. (Meaning of Life just doesn’t work, at least as I remember it; the better production values end up making the black humor chaos feel menacing and cheerless.) Holy Grail takes place in a fantasy setting and simultaneously feels like it’s held together with tape, both of which help keep it within a spirit of play. It’s like there’s not enough room for anything to fall flat. Limitations, which is to say appeals to the imagination, go a long way in making the audience’s engagement broader and freer. That movie functions much closer to the space of the Terry Gilliam animations.

I think people tend to esteem Life of Brian more highly than Holy Grail — or highly at all — principally because the things it seems to touch on are actually important. Spiritual leadership, politics, ideological hypocrisy. That kind of stuff puts off sparks of intelligence just by showing up. But I think mostly it just shows up. And that’s fine! I’m glad it’s not a message movie or a self-important satire. I much prefer blithe comedy, which is what this is. The problem is solely that the comedy is, you know, hit and miss, and more than a little sloppy.

The non sequitur minute inside an alien spaceship is funnier to tell about than it is to watch. I’m glad it’s in there so that I can know about it as a thing that exists in a movie.

The whole movie is kind of that way. Kudos to them for making a comedy life of Jesus. I think my final word is: it’s fun that this happened and exists. But watching it might be beside the point.

Having poked around online I see that the above is very much a minority opinion. Well, take that, majority!

By the way, this isn’t some kind of cranky grown-up “you needed to see it when you were younger” thing. I did see it when I was younger, and felt the same. Albeit in fewer words. I thought it seemed like it had some vague agenda that was getting in the way of its being any fun. I figured it must be trying to do some kind of grownup thing that I didn’t care about. So I was actually kind of hoping that now as a grownup I would get more out of it. But I didn’t.

The commentary is by all five surviving Pythons, recorded separately and then edited into two tracks, one with Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and Eric Idle, one with John Cleese and Michael Palin. But none of them are talking to each other; the groupings seem simply to be for convenience. Feeling kind of ho-hum about the movie itself, I found more interest in these commentaries, which are pretty good. There’s something very odd and interesting in contemplating the actual personalities of these six men of rather different temperaments who were committed to being professionally silly together. It’s not quite as rich as John vs. Paul vs. George vs. Ringo but there’s something of that kind of juice to it if you let there be. I especially liked the on-set BBC documentary (I told you, I always love on-set footage!) which includes a segment where they all talk quasi-candidly about one another. I find it intriguing.

This is the third commentary I’ve spent with Terry Gilliam. By the way, he spends most of the time saying unsarcastically that Terry Jones was absolutely right to put the camera in all these places that he, Terry Gilliam, would never have wanted to put it. And very obviously feeling the opposite. This is Terry’s way.

Once you start seeing people’s behavior in terms of anxiety, you can’t shut it off. It’s everywhere!

Other stuff on there include the trailer (is that Morgan Freeman?) some correctly deleted scenes, and some amusing radio ads by the Pythons’ mothers (and Palin’s dentist, which apparently is not a joke). Not included is this interesting audio document, which didn’t come to light until more recently.

Relationship to the preceding movie. Hm. Tough this time. I guess they’re both about adult children of unappreciative mothers.

Apart from the songs, the score is essentially deadpan “movie music” music. It does the job and is helpfully well-bred and professional in a movie that can use all the surface professionalism it can get. It is by Geoffrey Burgon. I would normally have selected the end credits, but it’s an instrumental of “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” which of course is by Eric Idle, whereas I’m trying to highlight the score composer with these selections. So our selection is the prologue, which accompanies the Star of Bethlehem and the journey of the three kings. The yelp of Brian’s mother falling over at the end is, in a sense, the punchline. The Prologue.

Apparently this preceded the feature on its first UK release.