The first thing you notice about The Meaning of Life is that it takes no prisoners, even from the first shot, showcasing the six Pythons swimming around a pool of water, every bit the finned creatures they aspire to be. They’re nattering among themselves, trying to decide what is the best direction they and their audiences should take. Ultimately, they decide that this exercise is a pointless one, abandoning fulfilment for a journey of more menial transitions and sweet nothings.
In many ways, The Meaning of Life is Monty Python‘s truest film, showcasing the banal nature of life, through a series of strange set-pieces, some more bafflingly strange than others. Leaving the unimpeachable Life of Brian to one side, The Meaning of Life is Terry Jones’ masterpiece, the one Python who was committed enough to waft through hours of footage to carve the television serial together.
Determined to steer Monty Python’s Flying Circus away from the routine of sight gags and lewd, laddish one-liners, Jones drove the six-piece into stranger, more obscene territories in the 1970s, indirectly setting the stage for British comedies to come. From the barren wilderness of The League of Gentlemen to the decadence and splendour of Toast of London, Jones’ editing and directing style indirectly proved the blueprint for alternative comedies, carving a niche based on weird, unsettling abstract expressions of thought and direction.
Film projects Holy Grail and Life of Brian abandoned this style for narrative, but Jones was eager to bring the troupe back to their stylistic roots for what soon became the group’s swansong. Initially met with resistance – John Cleese was quick to point out the film’s failings – the Welsh born-director eventually won out, creating an artful project that was more uncompromisingly Pythonesque in its resolve than the cinematic features that had filled out their oeuvre.
The film typically meanders in its direction to the end of the film, guided by the audience’s desire to uncover the truth behind their existence. The journey brings viewers from the brinks of the Zulu wars, to the rugby pitches where boys and men race to do justice for their collective tribe. Along the way, we see a naked Cleese in mid-coitus, exhibiting the frivolous nature of the headmaster in the realm of secondary school.
Education had united the Python actors, as it was their extra-curricular activities in Oxford and Cambridge that drew the attention of the public at large. Zingers and words were the foundations of comedy, but it was the mixture of visual and verbal that served The Python troupe, by way of Terry Gilliam‘s anarchic animation, and the punchy editing cuts that plunged viewers from one disparate set-piece into another.
Cinema didn’t have to make sense in order to make a point, and what transpires in the film is a sense of ridiculousness, whether it is laughing at Protestants belittling the Catholic contingent who built their country, or fulfilling the silliness of existence by way of a lowly housewife eager to return to her beginnings by donating an organ for charitable causes. Eric Idle punctuates the madness with a series of vaudeville numbers, each number rooted in the music hall tradition that was deeply English in its delivery, furthering the metaphor he sang at the end of Life of Brian, advocating the enjoyment of the present above all other avenues in life.
“Having done The Holy Grail and Life of Brian,” Michael Palin recalled, “We found ourselves with a much bigger budget for The Meaning of Life. This meant we could spend an entire week on things like the sketch with Mr Creosote [the monstrously fat diner]. The sheer amount of minestrone used in the vomiting sequence was only possible because we were with Universal. That part was filmed at Seymour leisure centre in Paddington. On the morning after the final scene, in which Mr Creosote explodes and thousands of gallons of vomit get hurled against the walls, the room was all cleaned up immaculately – and, within 12 hours, two people were married in there. I wonder if they ever knew what had happened hours before.”
The budget shows on the screen, particularly during the closing moments, are presented as reverently – and as impressively – as any Broadway musical. The film also hints at many of the solo projects the individual members of the troupe would undertake: It holds the romance of A Fish Called Wanda, the grandeur of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the geographical grandeur of Pole to Pole and the bravado of theatrical favourite Spamalot.
Each of them benefitted, but the film is ultimately Jones, who captures his project more confidently than ever before. If Life of Brian was fundamentally Graham Chapman’s film, then The Meaning of Life is Jones’ finest hour, and what an hour it is too, creating a mad sense for the eyes and ears.
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