Along the way we get a dizzying ride through the Jerusalem of Pilate and Christ, a time of complicated imperial flexes and violent religious extremism. A public stoning goes horribly wrong after its terms of reference get impossibly knotted, Brian, literally falls into the place of a market preacher and the impromptu nonsense he has to come up with, at first ridiculed by the crowd, wins him a cult like following in minutes. A leper cured by Christ, now without legitimate cause to beg for his living has to convince people he is an ex-leper. Pontius Pilate's r-lisp has his guards strain to keep from laughing as they see him punish anyone who breaks with life or death penalties. The twisted logic of the student collective style terror group meetings often leads them to forget the motions they were debating. If the previous outing Holy Grail satirised legend-making and the idea of Merrye Englande, Life of Brian pushed back against religious politics and its justifications from the Roman Eagles to the barefoot faithful on the streets (and in the same geographical neighbourhood, just quietly).
Brian remains the most coherently written narrative of all the Python movies and is the one whose production values and performances most closely resemble a mainstream blockbuster. You do this when you really have a thing to say, and this is the most focussed of the team's efforts. That its attack on religious convention is still potent today testifies to that concentration. That it is still funny is a reward to its creators for the commitment. But here, we hit a snag or two.
The controversy on its release from religious groups was the same as those that inadvertently aided the causes of Godard's Haily Mary and Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ. The famous debate on the BBC (moderated by Tim Rice, lyricist for the also-beleaguered Jesus Christ Superstar) has two leading Christian figures attempting to browbeat John Cleese and Michael Palin of the Pythons into submission with some heavy-head-in-the-sandedness even for forty five years ago, bypassing the message of independent thought and insisting it was a lampoon of Christ. Really, they had nothing. They actually had less than the nun on U.S. television who predicted California would fall into the sea as a result of Last Temptation (well, it is on a fault line). This broadcast is all over YouTube and I'd recommend it. But this as a debate has long passed.
The contentious moments of Life of Brian have to do with cultural shifts in the decades since its release. There are many points of any generations-old cultural artefact that might appear problematic after decades of social change but for this case, I'm going to pick only two. Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam play (apart from a number of other roles) a pair of prison lowlifes. Gilliam is made up as a Boschian grotesque and might well be a torturer. He is portrayed as deaf and insane. Idle is given a grinding stutter. The joke of it is that this slows down scenes in which characters need information quickly. On the surface of it, it looks like the stutter is the butt of the joke, but it's really the frustration of the delay. Also, there is a very strong and brief payoff that completely reverses our impressions of the characters, adds a layer of absurdism, and acquits the team of cheap shooting. It's risky but it wins.
In greater contention, though, is the early scene in which Eric Idle's character as one of the People's Front of Judea declares himself a woman and wants to have babies. When that is shouted down, another member suggests the compromise that he ought to at least have the right to have babies. Now, the machinery of the joke still works fine, it just has not made it through to now without scar tissue. I don't primarily write that with the notion that someone might feel hurt to see the scene (though that is important) but that the concept of trans people is no longer presented as an absurdity. The idea in 1979 was not unknown, and certainly not new but its passage into mainstream society feels so natural that joking about it sounds old. Old in the way a comedy bit about a drunk, cross-eyed and staggering, no longer works. It's just not funny now.
For those who blitheringly use the term woke to dismiss anyone with a social conscience, the scene might even serve as a kind of badge of defiance. I'll leave them, and anyone who considers contrarianism anything but self-consuming bullshit, to their own songs. I watched the scene in company (same age range and very similar sensibilities) and we all kind of distanced ourselves from it, not in some haughty, righteous manner, or even sadness, more noting that it no longer worked. As, someone who finds himself further left leaning than he was decades ago as an undergraduate, I, by contrast, found the depiction of the terrorist meetings as minefields of ideological soundness hilarious, I yet have perspective on this other issue. Like the loping comedy drunk or the wisecracking woman-hater of yore, my response to the transphobia is closer to embarrassment than censure.
Can we get past that to the rest of the film and find it funny? I think so but I understand if someone directly affected by the joke would write all of it off. Hey, it's a great comedy but, really, it's also only a movie. My case for it has to do with its concentrated push against prescribed thinking, and its broadsides against the brutality of military occupation. At the risk of cheapening my own argument here I will say that any movie that saves a character from a fatal situation by having him suddenly abducted by an alien warship, will always get my attention. Like any strong comedy, Life of Brian must be prepared to dig at its own times. That that can mean it errs against future community feeling is an impossible point of judgement. And guess what, almost all of it is completely bloody funny.
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