End Games is a feature in which I discuss
notable endings in film history. There will be spoilers, obviously.
It is widely
known that the most difficult part of sketch comedy is finding a way to finish it.
Sketches are all about taking a premise, exploring it for a few minutes, and
by that point the fun part is over. Once that’s done, the writers have to find a way out
that’s still funny, but such a conclusion usually does not exist. They can go with a final
punchline or gag, but more often than not that winds up being more cheesy than
satisfying. Watch any collection of Saturday
Night Live sketches and you’ll see what I mean. Even the best ones tend to
go out on a flat note. That is part of what made Monty Python’s Flying Circus so revolutionary when it started
airing in 1969. Their sketches completely did away with the typical structure,
and they would regularly flip from bit to bit once they felt an idea had been
exhausted. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for one sketch to interrupt the
preceding sketch a couple minutes before it would usually end. When the
legendary six-man comedy troupe made the leap to feature films, they found
themselves facing the same challenge. Their films essentially amounted to piles
of hilarious ideas, but when it came time to find the exit it proved more
difficult then they initially expected.
While Monty Python and the Holy Grail is
technically the gang’s second feature—their first being the mostly forgotten
sketch film And Now For Something
Completely Different—it is certainly the first time they had to deal with
anything resembling structure. Or at least the general expectations of what a
movie is supposed to be. As one might expect, the film's plot just winds up being
a clothesline on which they can hang the various mini-sketches, but it turns out co-directors Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones were quite adept at turning this
mish-mash into a cohesive whole. Much of that is due to the impressive acting and character work. Graham Chapman’s struggles with alcohol and other such things during his
time in Monty Python have been well-documented, but when it came time to start
making movies he was able to slip into the leading man role surprisingly well.
His King Arthur provides the film a much-needed center of gravity, even when
the camera turns to look at the adventures of the supporting knights.
Therefore it’s
no surprise that when the film enters into its final few minutes, the focus
shifts exclusively to Arthur as he approaches the Castle Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh.
Once there, he finds that the fortress is now controlled by a group of insulting
Frenchmen who they met earlier in the film. After being refused entry and
having a great deal of feces dumped upon his head, Arthur and his right hand
man Sir Bedevere go off to plot their revenge. There is a montage of their army
gearing up for battle, Arthur gives the French a last warning, and then they charge. Only
before they reach the castle, our heroes come up against an unexpected enemy:
the budget.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail was made for just under £230,000, which
calculates to approximately 1.6 million modern U.S. dollars. That wasn’t much
money back then, and it’s certainly almost no money right now. That’s the
reason why the characters don’t ride real horses in the movie. It wasn’t pure
comedic inspiration. The troupe always planned on having horses, but when they
found out the budget would not allow that, they came up with the running
coconuts gag. That’s part of what made Monty Python so wonderful; they were
brilliant at adapting to difficult situations, and they would often do it in a
joyously self-referential manner. Since they couldn’t even afford horses, there was
no way they would ever be able to
stage an epic battle sequence in front of Castle Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh. Instead,
they created a side story in which a knight murders a modern-day historian
early on. This triggers a police investigation, and just when the Battle of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh
looks like it’s about to take place, the coppers come in and take our two
protagonists into custody. Then the movie ends. There are no credits or title
cards. Just lovely, lovely elevator music for five solid minutes.
It’s a very
funny ending, if not a particularly graceful one. The good thing about
comedies, though, is that the endings don’t need to be graceful, because grace
isn’t that funny. As performers, the Pythons were terrific at playing different
characters and giving them a (mostly fake) sense of depth, but they never had
any real interest in touching audiences on an emotional level. They were only
interested in experimenting with comedy and finding unique ways to make people
laugh. I’m not sure there’s ever been another comedy troupe that’s been so
adept at mixing silliness and intelligence, and that’s part of why they’re
still appealing to so many people. Monty Python created comedy that was
hilarious to both discerning adults and non-discerning non-adults. For this
same reason, Holy Grail is still
perhaps the most broadly engaging of their films. One second there will be a
small group of peasants arguing with King Arthur about the flaws of the British
monarchy, and the next there will be a scene in which various animals are used
as projectiles. This sense of brilliant nonsense persists until this abrupt
ending, which is both completely absurd and probably the most comically satisfying
resolution they could have come up with. As was the case in Flying Circus, they reached a point when
they were out of ideas, and just decided to move on to the next thing.
That next thing
turned out to be Life of Brian, which
is probably the best film Monty
Python ever made, empirically speaking. That’s not to suggest it is high art—at
one point the eponymous hero finds himself aboard a spaceship piloted by two one-eyed aliens—but
it’s the closest they ever came to actually telling a single story and seeing
it through to completion. It also happened to be a needlessly controversial
story, as many Christian groups objected to the blatantly religious subject
matter. Here’s the thing, though: Life of
Brian doesn’t necessarily make a mockery of religion, nor does it have a
particularly negative view of Christianity or Jesus. Jesus himself only appears
early on, and very quickly the camera moves to the very back of the crowd, and this
reveals the film’s true intentions. It has no interest in directly engaging
Christianity, but instead finding humor in the world around it. The story has
nothing to do with Jesus, but instead with a protagonist who is mistakenly seen
as the Messiah.
There are plenty
of Holy Grail-esque digressions as
well, including an early sketch at a stoning and a hilarious scene where Brian
gets an unexpected grammar lesson from a guard. But it all leads up to the famous climax, in which Brian is crucified along with a gaggle of other
characters. This was always going to be the ending, of course, but while
writing Life of Brian the Pythons
could not come up with a way to appropriately go to the credits. There are
plenty of jokes in the crucifixion scene itself, and they’re mostly good ones,
but none of them are good enough to close on. After all, they were essentially
ending their movie by leaving the protagonist up on a cross to slowly die a
painful death. It’s not exactly laugh riot material, and it seemed like the
resolution was inevitably going to wind up feeling flat.
Then came a
stroke of genius in the form of Eric Idle’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of
Life,” which only further proves the theory that if you don’t know how to end
something, just throw in a musical number. Not only did it give Monty Python a
way out, but it also leaves the audience on an unexpectedly upbeat note. All
things considered, this is a pretty cruel way to end a comedy, but this song
completely erases much of the potential misery. (It also makes one forget that
this final scene is actually a little bit clunky up until the song begins.
Funny, but clunky.) Then, in true Python form, the film ends with a bit of
self-referential comedy as Idle acknowledges the start of the credits. With
this fantastic three-minute song, Life of
Brian went from having no ending whatsoever to one of the most famous
endings in comedy history, and its influence is still evident in film today. Earlier this year, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg had the
same idea when they concluded This is the
End with a rendition of “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back).” When in doubt, go
with a song.
Monty Python
carried this lesson with them into the production of The Meaning of Life, which concludes with the number
“Christmas in Heaven.” It’s not nearly the song “Always Look on the Bright Side
of Life” is, and the Pythons almost seem to acknowledge this by cutting it off
well before it is through. This is typical of Python, of course, but it does
hint at a certain hunger for ideas that permeates every frame of The Meaning of Life. Lacking a
compelling story to tell in the vein of Holy
Grail or Life of Brian, the
troupe decided to throw all that away and make their second sketch film. It may
revolve a broad universal theme—life, death, etc.—but it’s more or less a
barely-connected sequence of scenes in the vein of their original television
series. Inevitably, the end result was an uneven film that still somehow
managed to win the Grand Prix at Cannes.
That’s not to
say it isn’t worthy of praise, as The
Meaning of Life has some of my favorite sequences and sketches the group
has ever done. (If you think I conceived this post just to watch “Every Sperm
is Sacred” a few million times, you’re absolutely right.) As a whole, it’s much
less successful, and that’s more a product of the format and where Monty Python
was at the time of production. Most documentaries and interviews with the group
since The Meaning of Life has
revealed that its production was more a result of their desire to just make one
more movie and go on with their lives. The process was a tad forced, and some
segments show it.
This is doubly
true of the ending, which is hardly the most inspired climax that Monty Python
ever came up with. “Christmas in Heaven” is followed by a brief coda in which a
cross-dressing Michael Palin babbles on about nothing in particular for a
couple minutes before the credits start. It’s mildly amusing, but like most
everything else in The Meaning of Life
it doesn’t quite cohere with anything around it. There’s a great mini-feature
to be made from this film, but as a 90-minute whole it just can’t quite sustain
itself. By the time it gets to the ending, you can tell that the Pythons are
just as done with it all as the audience. The peculiar endings for Holy Grail and Life of Brian feel like they came from an abundance of creativity
and ideas. When The Meaning of Life
ends, it seems as if it’s all run out of steam. Even genius has its limits.
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