Film Review
The last film to feature all of the members of the original Monty
Python team dispenses with the coherent storyline of their last two
cinematic offerings and reverts to the sketch format of their television
show. In typical Pythonesque fashion, the film makes no attempt
to do what its title implies (i.e. explain the meaning of life) but
instead treats us to some of the most tasteless and offensive material
the team have ever devised. You have to have a pretty warped
sense of humour to find this film consistently hilarious, and it is
certainly not the best choice of viewing if you are a staunch Roman
Catholic (at least not unless you are in the habit of donating your
offspring for scientific experimentation). Just about every
sacred cow under the sun gets slaughtered and manically eviscerated by
Cleese, Palin, et al, as they endeavour to succeed where
Bertrand Russell, Saint Augustine and Michael Fish so evidently failed.
To say that
The Meaning of Life is
a mixed bag would be to make an understatement of almost the same
magnitude as describing World War II as an unfortunate difference of
opinion over how to resolve the race issue. Whilst it is a
delight to see the Pythons together and recapturing some of the
unpredictable anarchic madness of their first two TV series, their
sketch formula clearly does not work as well on the big screen as it did
on that little box in the living room. The quality of
material in this bumper helping of Pythonesque lunacy is extremely
variable, ranging from the brilliantly satirical (such as an inspired
musical send up of the Catholic Church's attitudes towards
contraception) to the frankly naff (exemplified by the sequence in
which a convicted criminal is chased to his death by a squad of topless
females, a sequence that makes Benny Hill look
sophisticated). There is around thirty minutes of top-notch
comedy here, but there is a greater abundance of timewasting nonsense
which makes the film appear much more tiresome and vulgar than it
really is.
Like Douglas Adams before them, the Monty Python team reduce their
search for the meaning of life to a statement of the absurd, although
Adams does it far more succinctly and without endless disgusting
digressions relating to bodily functions and existentialist
philosophy. After the superb
Life of Brian,
The Meaning of Life feels like
reheated leftovers that have been left on a rat-infested sideboard in a
germ warfare laboratory for far too long. Just how the film came
to win the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 1983 is a mystery of truly
mind-boggling proportions, although if we could explain that one we
would probably be half way towards understanding the meaning of life,
reductio ad absurdum.
The Python fans will of course find the film hilariously funny and will
probably crucify anyone who says otherwise. Others will see it
for what it really is: a cobbled together concoction of unrelated
skits, many of which struggle, as pathetically as a drowning seal pup,
to find humour in cheap grossness and highschool cosmology. And
further more, I take particular umbrage at the portrayal of the British
Army as a collection of namby-pamby stereotypical... Apologies,
this review appears to have been hijacked by the ghost of Graham
Chapman. (It's a good thing we have a fully qualified exorcist
standing by for just this eventuality.) Where were we? Oh
yes,
The Meaning of Life.
The Pythons pretty well answered this one in their first television
series, so the film does not have much more to add and feels
like a wasted endeavour. Still,
anything that puts people off eating salmon mousse for life cannot be a
bad thing. If this film's portrayal of Heaven
(as an everlasting Christmas offering endless
re-runs of
The Sound of Music)
is accurate, I personally would prefer to end up in the other place.
  At least I would have the Monty Python team to keep me company.
© James Travers 2010
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
The Monty Python team take up their greatest challenge yet, one that
has defied the greatest philosophers, scientists, theologians and
weather forecasters for countless millennia. In precisely one
hour and forty-eight minutes, they have set themselves the task of
answering the biggest question of them all: just what is it all
about? It all begins, predictably, with birth in an NHS
hospital equipped with a machine that goes
Ping! and ends with death by salmon
mousse at a posh dinner party, followed by a sneak preview of what
comes afterwards. Of course, the interesting bit is what happens
in between these two momentous events, the messy and chaotic thing
called life. Live organ transplants, exploding bons vivants,
talking fish, suicidal leaves and an office block masquerading as a
pirate ship go some way towards illustrating the absurdity of existence
in a Godless universe, but does any of this bring us any closer to the
nub of the matter? Just what
is
the meaning of life?
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.