Monty Python’s Life of Brian: The Wrong Messiah

What makes Life of Brian so resonant isn’t its treatment of religion but its casual approach to the unspeakable horrors of its world. The offhandedness speaks to the film’s real disgust, evident in several moments throughout: the bodies of slaves and gladiators lying in pieces on a coliseum floor; the slapstick spectacle of a stoning, in which merely uttering the word Jehovah produces an immediate hail of rocks, no matter the speaker; the almost industrial efficiency of crucifixion, with a patient bureaucrat (Palin) politely confirming the fate of each of the condemned before sending all of them off to march through the streets of Jerusalem.

Yes, it’s a goofy comedy. No, it’s not really meant to be taken seriously. And yes, the fact that the Pythons are playing most of the parts (including most of the female ones) and showing up repeatedly in different personae lends an additional distance to the material. Regardless, one wants to scream in outrage while watching Life of Brian. Maybe that’s why the charming closing song, “Bright Side of Life,” cheerily sung by a group of men hanging on crosses, hits so hard—because there is obviously no bright side.

The Pythons had certainly been here before. Holy Grail’s depiction of a witch trial, with a pious inquisitor calmly declaring that a woman will be sentenced to death as a witch if she floats in a pool of water (and declared innocent if she merely sinks to the bottom and drowns), remains one of its most cutting sequences. Despite their fondness for wild flights of surrealism, the troupe’s comedy always worked best when it spoke to something familiar, to prevalent attitudes and cultural prejudices and common behaviors. Though witch trials weren’t common in the seventies, there was at the time something quite raw and poignant about the hilariously matter-of-fact, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t insanity of the aforementioned sequence. There still is.

The Pythons were always great at channeling the anxieties of the prep-school set; that unease lies at the heart of many of their best bits. Watch the pure terror on Brian’s face when he is discovered one night attempting to paint “Romans go home” on a wall. The hectoring centurion (Cleese) who catches him begins to correct Brian on his poor Latin and starts quizzing him on verb tenses and word choices. As the scene goes on and the lesson gets more intense, Brian becomes even more frightened. This is no longer a foiled resistance operation; it’s a very, very bad day in Latin class, which in this film’s vision is more terrifying than getting caught red-handed by the Romans in an act of terrorism.

So many of the episodes in Brian’s life play like boyhood terrors. He finds out his father wasn’t his father after all. He finds himself unwittingly taking the place of a wannabe prophet and struggling to come up with coherent things to say, as the small crowd starts expressing its doubt and disapproval. Then, when he leaves a sentence unfinished, that same crowd becomes convinced that he’s actually holding back secret wisdom and that he is a prophet, chasing him through the streets and obsessively hanging on his every word. Every step of the way, Brian finds himself incapable of dealing with the rules of the world around him. A hilarious bit with a market seller (Idle) who chastises him for not haggling over the price of a fake beard (and, later, a free gourd) is another inspired bit of Pythonesque lunacy, built as it is on a weaponized politeness that these oh-so-British comedians always portrayed so brilliantly.

This through line of anxiety and outrage powers the film. Jones (directing solo, after codirecting Holy Grail with Gilliam) leans into the idea of the fever dream by frequently shooting in close-up, bringing his camera into Chapman’s wide-eyed, terrified face. That may sound like a simple directorial move, but it’s a far cry from the comic tableaux of Holy Grail, which often relies on the slapstick spectacle of the Pythons decked out as knights, knocking coconuts together to imitate their absent horses, or on sudden bursts of unexpected and uncalled-for acts of violence. Life of Brian had a larger budget and more cinematic ambition—it was shot in Tunisia, on some of the sets used in Franco Zeffirelli’s miniseries Jesus of Nazareth—but it’s a much more internalized film than any other Python project. Despite the troupe’s fondness for pantomime and their cavalier attitude toward narrative logic, this picture actually dares to explore its protagonist’s psychology. Brian is a relatable character, an almost modern figure lost in a mad, archaic world. Gilliam himself would riff on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with his films Time Bandits (1981) and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018); one can detect a similar sensibility at work here.

The troupe’s roles feel more carefully suited to their personae this time, and that adds to the film’s curious power. Chapman brings to Brian the same everyman appeal he brought to King Arthur, but he laces it with a feverish innocence; Jones is wonderfully brusque as Brian’s surly, suspicious mom. Cleese’s many roles make fine use of his ability to portray parodies of leadership: he’s the strident high priest leading the stoning; the fussy Roman captain; and Reg, the smug head of the People’s Front of Judea. Palin, with his thin lips and wide mouth, always brings a deliciously submissive quality to his parts, which makes him perfect for playing the feckless Pontius Pilate, whose inability to pronounce the letter r and subsequent mortification before the populace betray a lack of confidence. Idle always seems to be the hyper-talkative one, going on and on about the size of other people’s noses, the proper way to haggle for a gourd, and the quality of the pricey stones he’s selling; he also plays the annoying jokester among the group of crucified men at the end, as well as the one who starts singing “Bright Side of Life.” Given the chatty nature of Idle’s roles, it feels almost like an in-joke that he also plays a jailer’s assistant with a paralyzing stutter.

Life of Brian’s clarity and consistency help explain its longevity. But perhaps one other element contributes to Brian’s staying power—one of its most timely (and, since the film is now more than forty-five years old, timeless) bits. Amid all its outrage, the movie saves some of its most vicious barbs for the sad state of organizations that pretend to pursue meaningful change. When we first see the People’s Front of Judea, they bicker about their differences with the Judean People’s Front and the Judean Popular People’s Front. Later, they argue over meetings and resolutions and arcane word choices. They spout ideology but can’t actually do anything. They claim to be activists, but they never act—they’re all language and paperwork and committees. These gags become even funnier—and more harrowing—as the film goes on and we realize that the situation unfolding on-screen really could use a group of heroic revolutionaries to come and save the day. The People’s Front of Judea, alas, turns out to be useless, as do the Judean People’s Front and their “crack suicide squad,” who show up at the last minute in dramatic fashion and . . . well, kill themselves. It might honestly be the funniest moment in the film—as well as the saddest and scariest. Maybe that’s Life of Brian’s true blasphemy: it dares to remind us that we live in a horrible world where nobody is coming to save us.