The Pythons’ masterpiece gets an immaculate re-issue
Like the film itself “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” the cheery capo to Monty Python’s biblical satire The Life of Brian is an unlikely success. A crucifixion is not the most obvious place to stage a song-and-dance — or even a song-and-twitch for that matter. That the film ends on such a positive note and that the song itself has been accepted to the point that it’s one of the 10 most requested songs at British funerals according to former Python Eric Idle is quite an achievement.
The song is the most blatant piece of irony in a film that’s already full up with it. The story of the boy who grew up in the manger down the hall from that more famous one Brian had the British comedy troupe take on what was (and still is) the most contentious possible subject matter at a time when blasphemy laws were still being actively prosecuted in Britain. The result is not so much a ridiculing of Christ as some groups feared and accused at the time but more of a jab at exactly the types most apt to be offended. It skewers weak-minded followers and dogmatic literalists while offering up a moral of independent thinking that’s every bit as necessary today as on the film’s initial release.
It’s also the most coherent statement the Pythons ever made. While Holy Grail wasn’t much more than an assemblage of sketches — albeit great sketches — with a medieval theme Brian is an honest-to-God story. The addition of a real narrative actually does wonders for the group as it forces them to be a little less indulgent (just a little though as space aliens speech impediments and impromptu grammar lessons all indicate) and a little more thoughtful. In fact it seems like more theological thought went into the production of Brian than the heavy-handed but pious Passion of the Christ whose theatrical run prompted a re-release of the Python film.
The amount of care that went into the writing of Brian is evident in the new DVD edition’s most surprising addition — a complete read-through of an early draft of the script illustrated with director Terry Jones’s original storyboards. Those who assume the Pythons are just winging it most of the time will be shocked — nearly every snarky aside and every bit of nonsense is carefully written out beforehand. It’d have to be. When you’re worried about going to jail for the jokes you’ve written you have to choose your words carefully.
