Chapter Two: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
By Brett Beach
January 6, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
"I dunno know. Must be a king."
"Why?"
"He hasn't got shit all over him."
Welcome to the first Chapter Two of 2010: The Year We Make Contact (I just had to make that pun quickly and get it out of the way. From here on in, it's all seriousness. Promise. And no, I'm not doing that particular sequel this week. The decade just started. What's the rush? )
Any day now, I will become a father for the first time and I find my thoughts centered on one important question above all others. Well, to be honest, there are two questions. The first is: will I reach the point where I can change a diaper blindfolded at 3 in the morning on no sleep in under a minute? (Wait, why am I blindfolded in this scenario?) The second is: will this child grow up to be as much of a film geek as I am?
Admittedly, both questions are kind of self-serving. I am indulging my tendency towards self-deprecation on the former, while on the latter I am engaging in just the sort of behavior that I hope to avoid as a father - namely, fervently wishing that my son or daughter will take after me in the areas that matter (e.g. have the same great taste and critical acumen for the arts that I pride myself on having.) All I want - at my most noble and least self-serving - is for him or her to be as happy as humanly possible without that happiness coming at the expense of hurting others. It seems straightforward but I know at heart all I can do is share what I have learned and be a good role model for Finn (or Opal or Iris) and life and time, as they say, determines all the rest.
So to complete my train of thought as it makes all its stops, my mortality has been on my mind more than the usual amount what with this big change coming and a new decade arriving and year-end lists of all sorts being tallied and resolutions being resolved. It was all the thinking about the best films of the year and the best films of the decade that got my synapses firing and wondering what the best year for films in my lifetime has been. I can say, kind of by default, that it was not the past year.
2009 was probably the year in which I logged in fewer viewing hours of total releases (past and present) than at any other point in the last 20 years. I didn't feel up to doing a top 10 or 20 or even five because I wasn't able to get the full breadth of the circuit with enough foreign, independent and avant-garde fare to balance all the mainstream stuff, and a lot of that I saw second-run as it was. Five films that I can say I adored would include: Drag Me To Hell, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Adventureland, and I Love You, Man. I had more luck assembling a best of 2000-2009 and although I didn't rank the 25 I selected, I would place A.I. Artificial Intelligence and 25th Hour a centimeter or two above the rest. My thoughts and feelings on the pair would involve a whole side essay but both move me to paroxysms of emotion and I remain curious to track their critical status, as I, and they, grow older.
When a year in review article comes around, the clichéd line usually goes something like, "It wasn't a great year and I struggled to find enough to fill a best of list" or "It was a fairly rotten year but here were the films that shone through all the crap" etc, etc. And of course, it seems that these sentiments get repeated year after year. I have never bought into this sort of pessimism, thankfully, but the flip side is that I have a hard time determining if one year decidedly stands out among all others. When I chose to ask and answer the question, I quickly saw that yes, one year during my time on Earth held a fair number of the films that I would put on my list of all time favorites. The year is 1975 and I was around for most of it, albeit on the dark side of the womb.
The films released that year that were nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture in early 1976 (mere weeks after I was born!) were Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Even if you remain skeptical about the importance (or lack thereof) and meaning (or lack thereof) of the Academy Awards in the great scheme of things, that is an impressive list. I must duly confess that I have still never seen Cuckoo's Nest. This is the kind of statement that results in affronted gasps from some and veiled references to my cinematic manhood (or lack thereof) from others, and I have no good reason why I haven't gotten around to it. It just hasn't happened. I have only seen Jaws once but it was on the big screen a few years ago and I was amazed at how the film that launched the modern block . . . (wait for it) . . . buster seemed almost glacially paced (in a good way) when viewed in light of 30+ years of increased quick editing and frenetic action. The story may be apocryphal of Spielberg's decision to hold off on showing the shark until halfway in, but it was a wise one and in the right hands, less will always be more.
Barry Lyndon and Nashville are the two I have the biggest place in my heart for: Kubrick's finest and one of the most gorgeous color films ever; and top-tier (if not quite my favorite) Altman with an ending so big-hearted and majestic that I get goose bumps if I think about thinking about it. But beyond that were others as worthy of being in that select group:
Three Days of the Condor: Sydney Pollack serves up one of the great paranoid political thrillers and makes Robert Redford run a gauntlet of violence to learn whatever truth there is to be had.
Night Moves: Arthur Penn's still underrated detective film with Gene Hackman as a not quite cynical enough private eye who takes on a case he shouldn't and winds up causing a lot of deaths. The wordless climax out on the Atlantic Ocean is harrowing and tragic.
Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: Finally available on DVD thanks to Criterion, this three and a half hour epic in miniature builds a wall of tension thanks to eight-minute long takes and a complete lack of close ups, point of view shots, or any suggestion of interior psychology. As Jeanne, Delphine Seyrig is the original domestic goddess. Not for the weak-willed.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show: I was finally de-virginized at age 28. I have belted out Science Fiction/ Double Feature at karaoke halls and am comfortable enough with my sexuality to say that Tim Curry is hotter here than Susan Sarandon.
The Passenger: Antonioni teams with Nicholson for an existential crisis dressed up as a thriller and the latter contributes a wonderfully subdued performance. I don't want to know how Antonioni pulled off the closing unbroken tracking shot. Some mysteries should remain as such.
And then, there's Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For their follow-up to And Now For Something Completely Different, the sextet from England delivered 90 minutes of songs, blood, and lunacy and in the process ruined any hope for seriousness that a lot of lesser (straight-faced) historical epics aspired to. I remember laughing out loud watching Braveheart in the theater in May ‘95 because much of the overly violent bone crushing reminded me of the Black Knight's sword fight with King Arthur. Like some other comedies - So I Married an Axe Murderer, National Lampoon's Vacation, Weekend at Bernie's - Holy Grail is for me a sure-fire spirit picker-upper to return to again and again. Unlike those others, it is also extraordinarily well assembled. It's probably too much to think that it would ever have had a chance to be nominated for an Oscar but in many of the major and technical categories, it would have deserved.
As referenced in an earlier column, I was denied access to this film as a child and didn't view in its entirety until junior high (I specifically chose it as my reward one semester for getting straight As). I wish I could say I appreciated it all back then, but that would be denying the genius of the multiple levels with which the Pythons stacked the Holy Grail. The visual lunacy and silly behavior can appeal to young ones while the more intricate wordplay, conversational digressions and plot meta-antics are there for repeat viewings and observations, as one grows older. I remember being very confused as a 12-year-old when the film just...ended. Now, as an adult, I wish there were more films that could find a way to present the credits at the beginning so that the film's ending could come as a surprise. And thanks to theatrical re-releases and DVD home viewing, it is possible to actually make out the wackiness of Holy Grail's opening credits and in the animated sequences and spot various assorted insanity happening in the margins of the frame.
My intent is not to make a case for Holy Grail being a great film on the script level or the acting level as I feel that has been done to death and I don't have a lot new to add. What I want to briefly shower praise on is how the look of the film - the cinematography, the production and costume design - works as well as the material does. This is, in its own way, as staggeringly gorgeous and visually intoxicating a film as Barry Lyndon. Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, with collaborators including Terry Bedford, John Hackney, Roy Smith, and Hazel Pethig, anchor the farcical proceedings in both lush green hillsides and fog so thick it seems to envelop you. A majestic castle towers lonely in the distance and the mud and water that must be crossed to get there seem suitably mucky and imposing. The violence is ridiculously bloody, there are a lot of unexpected and accidental deaths and this brutality becomes transformed into awkwardness well choreographed. The segues into and out of animation are razor sharp and the film's purposeful meandering never feels gratuitous. If the crucifixion scene at the end of Life of Brian is a bleakly comic reminder that life will keep on going until it doesn't, then the in medias res abruptness of the police shutting down the movie, the story, the history of Holy Grail drives the point home that "it doesn't" could happen at any time.
As the exchange between the peasants quoted at this column's start suggests, there was a lot of shit around back then and unless you had the means to keep out of its way, it would probably wind up bespattering you. Watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail and how well it seems to capture the feeling of an historical epoch (and then proceeds to set the epoch on fire and watch it burn), one can almost smell the muck and the shit.
Or maybe that's just me envisioning the diapers I am about to start changing.
Next time: A sideline into kiddie fare. Will this become permanent? I look at a Disney sequel from the late ‘70s (better than the original) and a non-Disney animated part two from the mid-‘80s (not good at all).