history

Rating: 10/10 (8 November 2000)

Most of what can be said about Life of Brian already has been. It's the Pythons' tightest, funniest (all right, so that's subjective) and most thoughtful film. I watched Ben Hur the whole way through for the first time the other day, and the only thing that made it's turgid portents bearable was picturing Charlton Heston asking "what have the Romans ever done for us?" The big irony is that in spite of deliberately placing modern characters and attitudes into a historical setting for the sake of comedy, Life of Brian is in many ways the more historically sensitive film. Ben Hur is typical Hollywood history, turning the Judeans into proto-liberal nationalists on a quest for freedom from oppression every bit as anachronistic and spurious as that of Mel Gibson's William Wallace. At least Braveheart has only the single-whammy of glib, historically insensitive, self-congratulatory, judgemental retrospect. Ben Hur doubles its money by throwing in religious pomposity for that extra emotionally-manipulative kick.
Life of Brian, on the other hand, despite forswearing any pretensions to historical accuracy, comes a lot nearer to providing a balanced historical perspective. What did the Romans ever do for us? Quite a lot, actually. Why are we resisting them? We're not quite sure. OK, so that's not particularly accurate either. The Jewish nation and subsequent diaspora is one of the pivotal test cases in any analysis of the concept of nationalism. Clearly, as the several major revolts demonstrate, there was real opposition to Roman rule, and it was proto-nationalist, insofar as any concepts of nation had by then developed. It's putting the heavily loaded - intrinsically modern - language of freedom into their mouths which is so offensive. It doesn't really need to be pointed out why Hollywood insists on doing this, but I'll do it anyway: it's a cheap way to cash in on the pride that every American is brought up to feel in the wonderful, mysterious accident of 1776. Someone else has already talked about Life of Brian's assault on selective history with regard to religion (still it's most powerful feature - I'm resolutely secular, but the level at which Christianity is ingrained into my culture is so fundamental that to conceive of the real-life figure of Jesus as just another bloke is still shocking). Life of Brian's common sense approach not only attacks this selectivity, it also lampoons retrospective history: the tendency to read one's own beliefs and priorities into people who viewed the world from an utterly different perspective and who, as the LP Hartley cliche has it, "do things differently". The People's Front of Judea are self-evidently ridiculous. But how can anyone have thought that Charlton Heston as Judea Ben Hur wasn't?