Review of 'Monty Python: Almost the Truth'
Six hours is a fittingly absurd stretch of time to contemplate the origin and successes of Monty Python, the legendary British comedy troupe, and chew over its deeper significance. Six hours is deliriously too much to look at, or look away from -- quite like an endless sketch from "Monty Python's Flying Circus," the BBC comedy that debuted 40 years ago and found phenomenal niche success in America on public television and on the movie screen.
You keep waiting for the giant foot from one of Terry Gilliam's collage cartoons to come down and squash it. (And it does!) Fans will bathe happily in IFC's documentary series "Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut)," which begins Sunday night at 9 and airs all week, chopped up into one-hour parts. (Chopped up? Come back, it's only a flesh wound!)
And as for non-fans? Well, they were always a dour lot, weren't they?
For if "Almost the Truth" imparts any axiom, it is this: Even now, Monty Python is a valuable litmus test of personality types, the perfect inside joke that always welcomed outsiders smart enough (or inane enough) to get it. Across college dorms and junior high schools from one continent to the next, and generation to the next, Python fans were able to suss out a common nerdy cheekiness in one another.
The documentary opens with postwar, stiff-upper-lipped England, where the five of the six men who ultimately formed Monty Python were born. (They are John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Terry Jones -- and they are all nearing 70 now. Another member, Graham Chapman, died in 1989 from cancer, at age 48. Gilliam, the cartoonist, was the troupe's lone American.)
Part 1 ("The Not-So-Interesting Beginnings") explores the Britain of the Pythons' boyhood: a middle-class culture of utter deference and rigid manners in a rebuilt, newly crowned Elizabeth II society that believed in rules above anything else. Out of boarding schools and the sketch-comedy cliques of 1950s Oxford and Cambridge came the Python players, thrown together by similar alignments of fate that put the Beatles together around the same time.
A Beatles/Python analogue runs through "Almost the Truth," underscoring the idea that no such act of genius could have ever happened the same way to popular counterculture to any other young men, in any other grouping, at any other time, in any other place. George Harrison even shows up in the later years, as the moneyed benefactor for the controversial 1979 Python movie "Life of Brian," a spoof on the life of Christ.
Monty Python is credited with a sardonic, even cynical edge that took shots at everything proper: pompous barristers, perverted accountants, clenched old women, daffy psychologists, inept military commanders, supercilious news anchors at their desks, who all seemed to represent a ruling class that the writers disdained. But looking at Python in retrospect, one is struck by the ribald joy of the work, the naked romping across the lush literal and metaphorical garden that is England. (And about that nakedness, actor Tim Roth and others jump in to note one reason so many little boys tuned into Monty Python: "You had a good shot at seeing some [breasts] -- even a cartoon pair of [breasts].")
There were only four seasons and 45 episodes of "Flying Circus," watched over and over by fans; two of their five films, "Life of Brian" and "The Holy Grail," have attained a status well beyond their initial box office. People are still singing about Spam and lumberjacks, or giggling about dead pet-store parrots and the Inquisition's torturous "comfy chair."
The Pythons themselves have excellent memories and apparently little animosity for one another or any lingering regrets. "As you get older, you laugh less, because you've heard all the jokes," says Cleese. "It's the real stuff that makes me laugh [now]." That's not very "Behind the Music" -- and what a relief.
They also seem less inclined to ascribe significance to their work, letting celebrity fans do that instead. Indeed, the best stories in "Almost the Truth" come from the many actors, writers and comedians who talk about its personal influence on them. Steve Coogan did command performances of Python sketches in his mother's kitchen; Lorne Michaels recalls that "Flying Circus," in fact, "presupposed a level of attention in their audiences that you couldn't do in America."
Sanjeev Bhaskar, a British writer and actor, recalls how upsetting "Flying Circus" was to his Indian immigrant parents: "You didn't really want your kid to be influenced by someone who is quite patently a bloke dressed as a woman with a high voice," he says. But eventually, even Bhaskar's mother was charmed, by "the fish-slapping dance" sketch (a perennial Python favorite). "My mom suddenly burst out laughing."
Eventually everyone does. And if they don't, they're certainly no friend of ours.
Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut) will air in six, one-hour parts next week, beginning Sunday at 9 p.m. on IFC.
Source: Washington Post
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