Life of Brian (dir. Terry Jones, 1979) — Review

Download the Life of Brian screenplay for personal, private use. 

“We must pay homage to him,” say the Wise Men. “We were led by a star.”

“Led by a bottle more like”, retorts Brian’s mother, slapping her mortal progeny around the head after a failed attempt to scam the visitors out of the Messiah’s gifts.

And so begins cinema’s unsurpassed depiction of a British Christmas.

Often overlooked in the category, in many ways Monty Python’s Life of Brian is the apogee of the non-Hollywood Christmas movie. Traditional staples of the genre dole out the peace on earth, mercy mild, and generally wholesome schlock which audiences might like to see, and feel, around the fraught but inevitable landmark of the ‘holiday season’. Equally, the flipside of “amplified loneliness, cynicism and family dysfunction” has carved out an association with films set in the Christmas period. The Hollywood tradition of ‘naughty’ or ‘nice’ festive movies generally presents such humbuggery as a pit-stop on the path to jubilant redemption (with classics like It’s A Wonderful Life and The Apartment following in the cantankerous footsteps of Ebenezer Scrooge).

A British Christmas, on the other hand, entertains no such pretentions of banishing misery. In the last four centuries, Britain has produced exactly two uncynical Christmas stories: A Christmas Carol and Love Actually. The former requires no less than three otherworldly entities to shake an emotion from the average repressed Englishman. The latter, while not overtly supernatural, teems with plot elements which, in Britain, could only be attributed to divine intervention: a Prime Minister with a moral compass; a functioning mental healthcare system; a man who learns his girlfriend’s European language; and a father talking about feelings with his son.

Life of Brian, on the other hand, features squabbling over politics, an overbearing mother, and extensive griping about regional infrastructure. It also ends with a totally avoidable disaster, caused by poor communication, which the characters sing into acceptance with the now-anthemic ‘Always Look On The Bright Side of Life’. Now that’s a British Christmas.

Life of Brian tells the tale of Brian Cohen (Graham Chapman) , a nice Jewish boy whose postnatal mixup with the newborn Christ sets him on a course of increasingly unfortunate blunders. Pushed around Judea selling wolf-nipple snack packs at the amphitheatre, berated not only by his mother (Terry Jones) but by the centurions disgusted by his execrable Latin grammar, Brian joins a Jewish resistance group after finding out that his father might be a Roman soldier. Despite his utter incompetence, Brian finds himself taken for the Messiah, in a satire not on Christianity but the disastrous effects of groupthink.

Far from railing against religion and the Christian message, Life of Brian voices a healthy, good-natured exasperation with a ridiculous world. In the Python theology, life’s daily frustrations are not a challenge to be overcome either mentally, with saccharine dosage of Christmas cheer, or materially, with a divine miracle that sweeps them from your path. A mum who disapproves of your girlfriend; an obnoxious salesman at the market; a lisping provincial governor who can’t see the humour in the name ‘Incontinentia Buttocks’. Rather than inspiring a miraculous intervention, Brian’s endless course of ridiculous grievances lead to a grim demise (for him as for some giggly centurions). But that’s the victory: as the film concludes that “life’s a piece of shit” — one may as well laugh at it.

Brian is a kind of humanist, secular Jesus, overwhelmingly weak and silly and not far removed from the various mobs who misinterpret his words, as well as the various Python sketch characters peopling the film. This is the biggest British Christmas gift the film has to give: its puncturing of the overwhelming stiff-upper-lip, and simmering tension, notorious for lingering around the holidays. Asked by one of Brian’s deluded followers if she is a virgin (‘if it’s not a personal question’), his mother Mandy responds: ‘How much personal can you get? Now piss off.’ Sometimes you want a cinematic paean to the joy, love, and heavenly peace of the festive period; sometimes, after a tense and hungover Boxing Day lunch, you may want Life of Brian.