A Fine Kettle of Fish

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MONTY PYTHON'S THE MEANING OF LIFE

Directed by Terry Jones; Screenplay by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.

Sex. Sacrilege. Scatology. And a bowlful of talking fish. There is a little something for everyone in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. Aside from the fish, who are extremely clubbable, most of the film is designed to offend somebody at the very moment it is making someone else fall helplessly about with laughter. And there is one unforgettable passage that should engender an exquisitely painful mixture of both responses in everyone.

Since The Meaning of Life is structured like the beloved old Python TV show, as a series of sketches interspersed with Terry Gilliam's inspired animation sequences, it provides a convenient place to measure how far the group has come from the Ministry of Silly Walks and the other cheery conceits of those more or less innocent days. As it turns out, the distance is huge. By now the writer-performers of the Python troupe have become a true flying circus, engaged in savage aerial combat with the institutionalized madness and hypocrisy of the age, performing their comic loops and turns dangerously close to a battleground that, they insist on reminding us with every low-swooping pass, is a sea of muck, blood and offal.

In the Pythonized seven ages of man, birth is an occasion either to satirize the technological and administrative absurdities of modern medicine or to assault the Roman Catholics (in a musical number complete with dancing nuns and singing bishops) on the matter of unfettered procreation; death is an inconvenient guest arriving belatedly at a middle-class dinner party. As for the other ages, they are seen variously as: a sex-education class in which, despite a live demonstration of the subject, the students pay about as much attention as if it were algebra period; a battlefield in which the officer class sleeps late, dines well and goes tiger shooting while the soldiers fight and die; a four-star restaurant in which the sin of gluttony is acted out with a vividness unprecedented in the history of cinema.

For better or worse, this is the scene no viewer of The Meaning of Life will ever wipe out of memory. In it, a grotesquely bloated Terry Jones waddles into a posh eatery and angrily orders at least a double portion of everything on the menu--and a bucket in order that he may conveniently throw up. This he proceeds to do endlessly, finally unwatchably, the while continuing to gorge himself until he literally bursts. It sounds horrible. It is horrible. It is also extraordinarily funny. For the headwaiter, sublimely played by John Cleese, hovers fussily over a man who is, after all, his best customer while the rest of the diners do their utmost to keep small talk flowing and decorum intact. The result is a devastating attack on the human (or is it merely middle class?) propensity for maintaining the genteel amenities no matter how brutally reality assails them.

With this film, the Pythons have gone beyond the customary limits of satire, beyond their own original premises. In their assaults on conventional morality, they generate a ferocious and near Swiftian moral gravity of their own. It is this quality that distinguishes their humor from the competition, rescues it from its own excesses and makes braving it an exhilarating experience.

--By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.