Monty Python’s Life of Brian came out in 1979, directed by Terry Jones, written by all six Pythons together, and produced by John Goldstone, with George Harrison quietly saving the whole production by financing it himself after the original studio got cold feet and walked. Graham Chapman plays Brian Cohen, born in the stable next door to a rather more famous baby on the same night, and cursed for the rest of his short life with extraordinarily bad timing. I have loved this film for longer than I can honestly account for, and every time I sit back down with it, I’m struck again by how a movie this silly manages to also be this wise.
Brian grows up poor and put-upon in Nazareth, joins the People’s Front of Judea, led by the perpetually outraged Reg, played by John Cleese, mostly to impress a woman. He gets talked into his first act of rebellion: spray-painting Latin graffiti on a palace wall, which earns him a grammar lesson from an offended centurion before the actual punishment even starts. It’s the first sign of what the whole film is really about, that even revolution gets bogged down in paperwork and pedantry if you let it.
Trying to dodge a Roman patrol afterward, Brian climbs onto a soapbox, opens his mouth to buy himself a few seconds, and by the time he’s finished his sentence he has followers. He denies being the messiah. They tell him only the messiah would deny it. He has lost an argument he never agreed to have, and he spends the rest of the movie losing it again and again, funnier each time.
What I love most, and what keeps pulling me back, is how little Brian actually does to any of this. He doesn’t seek fame. He doesn’t want followers. A crowd decides what he is and then refuses to be talked out of it, no matter how loudly Brian insists otherwise, no matter how plainly his own mother, played by director Jones himself in drag, tells them he’s not the messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. A gourd and a sandal become holy relics because people needed them to be.
Along the way there’s Michael Palin‘s wonderfully lisping Pontius Pilate, a man more offended by the mockery of his friend “Biggus Dickus” than by any actual insurrection, and Eric Idle‘s Mr. Cheeky, who talks his own execution into a lighter sentence just by being unbearably chipper about it. Terry Gilliam turns up in a half dozen smaller roles, jailers and revolutionaries and prophets in the crowd, the connective tissue that makes Judea feel packed with people rather than extras. That’s the whole joke, dressed up as a Bible epic: give a crowd of frightened, hopeful people the barest suggestion of meaning and they’ll build a religion around it before lunch, and nothing Brian says will make a difference once they’ve decided.
And then there’s the ending, which by all rights shouldn’t work and somehow works better than anything else in the film. Brian is crucified next to a long row of fellow condemned men, dozens of crosses stretching out along a hillside road, and just as the scene threatens to turn genuinely bleak, one of the men beside him starts whistling. Then he starts singing, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” cheerful and completely sincere, and one by one the rest of the row joins in, arms nailed in place, legs kicking along to the rhythm, until the whole hillside is one enormous, doomed chorus line. Brian, dying, sings along with them.
It is absurd and it is genuinely moving at the same time, and I don’t know another comedy that pulls off that particular trick this well. The film never once stops being funny, right up to the last frame, but it also never pretends the joke doesn’t have a cost, and that final scene is where those two things finally meet head-on. It shouldn’t work. A crucifixion set to a music-hall singalong should collapse under its own bad taste. Instead it becomes the most honest moment in the movie, because it’s the one place where the film admits that laughing at the absurdity of it all is the only real defense anybody has against how much it hurts.
Not every comedy earns the word classic. This one has, for over forty-five years and counting, and every time I watch it again, expecting to finally find the seams, I don’t. I just laugh, and then somewhere around the crosses, I feel something else too, and I still haven’t quite worked out how they did that.=
