Life of Brian: A Christmas Film That Shows The Bright Side Of Life

I wish to add a hasty disclaimer – Life of Brian, a film by Monty Python, the celebrated British comedic group, is not a Christmas film in the conventional sense of having a Santa Claus, a horde of children in tousled hair awaiting their gifts or a miracle and much family-friendly cheer. Yes, it does feature Jesus Christ himself, it portrays the moment of his birth in all its magical, rousing glory; it portrays him delivering the Beatitudes to a crowd of listeners; there are a few "miracles" and there is even a Pontius Pilate and inevitably a crucifixion too. But this film is not the story of the Nativity but rather the mostly amusing and also heart-breaking story of a boy born on the very same moment as the Son of God.

It is ingenious and admirable to see how the troupe – Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and American emigrant Terry Gilliam – take that one simple idea, itself ripe for all sorts of comic misunderstanding, and develop it into a full-fledged story. It's rich not only with endlessly laughable farce and scalpel-sharp satire at the expense of false prophets and bogus religion, but also a sense of poignant tenderness that makes us root for the enduring protagonist – the hapless man pitted against the Establishment. That poetic quality of great storytelling, as described by Anton Chekhov, of "life as it is and life as it should be lived", had lingered prominently in the Pythons' imagination before as well, in those sketches of The Flying Circus, where murderous barbers dreamt of becoming romantic lumberjacks or humdrum chartered accountants nursed dreams of taming lions (or were they ant-eaters?) only to be confronted with a condescending officious figure played usually by Cleese.

But in this film, the pathetic situation at the crux of the story is even more timelessly resonant. Like in the finest of Chaplin's comedies or Gilliam's own Brazil – a man is rendered completely bereft of the choice to escape the overwhelming odds stacked against him. Brian, the titular simpleton, played with pitch-perfect bewilderment by Chapman, is an ordinary Roman-hating Jew trying to get by without much fuss and somehow win the affections of an enigmatic woman named Judith Iscariot. But the film keeps on plunging him into the most absurd situations that even gain the surreal quality of nightmares, if they weren't so immediately laughable – from centurions who teach him how to write "Romans Go Home" in schoolboy Latin to pompous anarchists who hate each other more fervently than the Romans, from a lisping and indecisive Pilate to being mistook for the Messiah himself.

It is all flawlessly orchestrated by the Pythons in brilliant form, with barely a punch-line or a gag out of place, also outrageously inventive (in one scene, Brian is rescued from almost certain death by a spaceship piloted by goggle-eyed aliens that seems to be passing by). As before in their sketches as well as the side-splitting medieval film parody The Holy Grail, the troupe also finds enough room between pointed digs at false prophets and bogus religion to skewer the contemporary political and cultural atmosphere of Britain of the 1970s. The forever quarrelling anarchists, for instance, mirror the many left-wing radical groups that had mushroomed in the same decade, their inability to find fault with their Roman masters finds its echoes in every post-colonial bastion and that horrifyingly hilarious gag about a man being stoned for saying Jehovah still serves as a wry lament on the nature of fanaticism still prevalent today. Every member plays a meleé of characters more whimsical and wonky than the other, with my favourites being Cleese playing the self-serving anarchist leader Reg, Eric Idle as a shopkeeper who believes that one should haggle convincingly enough and, of course, Michael Palin playing the said Pilate, forever at a loss to understand why should his own guards laugh at him.

What makes it, though, a memorable Christmas film for me? There are two reasons for that. One of the most popular accusations made against Life of Brian is that it mocks Christianity and thus, in effect, Jesus Christ himself. A proper and discerning viewing of the film, however, reveals that its intended target is not the Son of God, who appears here like a sole image of dignity and intelligence, no matter that the people listening to him confuse "meek" for "Greek", but rather the many people who pretend to be him and thus mislead and fool the masses into worshipping them. That, as well as the fact that the Pythons took uncanny care for accurate period detail and even shot the film in the same Tunisian sets as Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, almost seems to be beckoning us to celebrate the moment rather than make fun of it.

In sharp relief to the many false prophets who stand and deliver their nonsensical monologues to spectators equally bewildered as us, Brian almost seems like a noble saviour. He advises his multitudes of almost obsessed followers not to believe in anyone and that they are all individuals. The tragedy of the film seems to be how this reasonable man is the one who has to be sacrificed by sheer accident simply to keep the illusion of his being the Messiah intact. As Eric Idle starts singing the rousingly hopeful Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, however, encouraging Brian and his other fellow sufferers doomed to their fate to join in and accept the circumstances with an English stiff-upper-lip, we are given an enduring and everlasting message for Christmas – to keep our chins up and wear our brightest smiles to bid farewell to a year of disappointment and wish for a good year with unblemished hope.