Always look on the silly side of belief

Rating: 9/10 (5 May 2009)

Three wise men wend their way to a small hut in a small town, 2000 years ago. They are in search of the Messiah and they come bearing gifts...but first they make a small mistake and deliver them to He who is not the Savior, Brian, who happens to be born on the same day, just down the alley from that Jesus fella. Brian grows up a fairly oblivious and apolitical mama's boy, though with less interesting in stonings than is usual. Alas, events lead him to work with the People's Front of Judea, the attempted kidnapping of Pilate's wife, accidental prophet-hood, and eventual crucifixion to the tune of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." The conventional wisdom on 'Life of Brian' is that it's the Python crew's most "polished" or "competent" film as a team, and I'd probably agree with that, though I find 'Holy Grail' funnier. It's still scatter-shot and somewhat inconsistent of course - I for one found the whole Pilate/Biggus Dickus thing a bit overlong, and the alien abduction while fun doesn't really add anything besides giving Terry Gilliam more to do - but it does actually feel like a moderately cohesive film, and of course it takes the typical Python over-the-top methods on attacking organized religion to a point which all but the most humor-challenged Christians ought to be able to admit to at least chuckling over - it's a bit more pointed and narrow in its humor. Of course, the film isn't really anti-Christian, or anti-Jewish, but rather anti-stupid. Maybe that was it's biggest problem....
Early highlights include the stoning scene and the scene with the ex-leper, but where the film really takes off in my mind is when Brian becomes an accidental prophet. It seems to be channeling or ripping off Holy Grail at first - smart, articulate Brian being completely misunderstood by the idiot peasants, just exactly as Bedevere in the earlier film presiding over the witch's trial - but the brilliance with which Brian quickly goes from being just another hairy crazed prophet (reminiscent naturally of street-corner shouters even today) to being followed all around by a witless mob is startling and hard for me to describe. I think this may be the high point of the Pythons' wordplay, and the fact that it's foreshadowed in an early scene where Brian and others are listening to the real Messiah but misinterpreting his words wildly only adds an icing to the cake. If there's a message to Life of Brian it's that people will hear what they want to hear, and sometimes no matter how clear you think you're being, you're not going to get through to them - especially if God's in the way; also, people want someone else to save them, to do the work of making the hard decisions – even if they have to turn off their brains to believe.
I find comedy harder to describe or critique than just about anything else; perhaps that's a cop-out but I'm not sure how I can really get at just how clever and funny the film is without quoting a bunch of dialogue, and what's the point in that? You're here on IMDb, you can check it out easily yourselves. I will close by saying that in one way 'Life of Brian' does seem to "conform" to the more modern style of religious "epic" - the Jerusalem and the Jews here are dirty, disheveled, and poor. Gone pretty much for good by this time is the splendor of the 50s and 60s Cinemascope epics - although I suspect that may have as much do with the small budgets of the Pythons' film, and Scorsese's and Gibson's later efforts, as with any conscious desire to make things grubby