A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #61: Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

I’m tak­ing a bit of a break from watch­ing Cri­te­rion films I’ve not seen before and doing a lit­tle catch-​up by writ­ing reviews for films I’d seen before I decided to work on this list. Appro­pri­ately, Monty Python’s Life of Brian starts off this pseudo-​sabbatical. Like most geeks, I’ve been a Python fan since early high school, and I’ve seen this film on the order of a dozen times or so. It has always been my sec­ond favorite after The Holy Grail, but I’ll read­ily admit that it is their best cin­e­matic work. In addi­tion to the taut­ness of the film the satire and social cri­tique is multi-​layered and still mean­ing­ful to this day.

The large num­ber of terrorist/​resistance orga­ni­za­tions empha­size and reil­lu­mi­nate the fact that Middle-​Eastern strife has been a con­stant for thou­sands of years. By point­ing this out in comedic terms, the idiocy of such vio­lence is under­scored. There is anger and frus­tra­tion hid­den behind the com­edy as well; much of it seem­ingly derived from the gen­eral igno­rance and sheep-​like qual­ity of humans en masse. Here too, the Pythons can preach with­out being preachy, and show time and again how peo­ple take lessons from the Bible and twist them to their own ends. We see that every­one has an ulte­rior motive, although they might be blind to it them­selves. Extrem­ism is the tar­get here, whether from an aggra­vat­ingly polit­i­cally cor­rect demo­c­ra­tic ter­ror­ist group or from the speech and mercy imped­i­mented Roman tyranny.

Yet there is also com­pas­sion and love in the com­edy. Jesus is never a tar­get and because of this it is pos­si­ble to rec­og­nize the Python’s own recog­ni­tion that sheep need a shep­herd, some­one as gen­uine as a Jesus or Brian. There is just the right blend of ham and grav­i­tas in the Python’s treat­ment of the Jews [that joke is prob­a­bly in bad taste] to know that strug­gles against oppres­sion are respected. In fact, the silli­ness serves as a kind of anthem to those who think that com­edy is a lesser art than drama or that it can­not tell as impor­tant a tale. If any­thing, I think it is prob­a­bly even more dif­fi­cult. Life of Brian man­ages it with ease.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by George Perry.
• A com­plete script of the film and other resources.
• The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion Review.