The basic
plot of the film is King Arthur, who is portrayed by Graham Chapman, trying to
gather his knights of the roundtable in order to complete God’s quest of
finding the Holy Grail, but it doesn’t seem to go as easy as that with many
trials and tribulations for each of Arthur’s Knights of the Roundtable which
includes Sir Lancelot (John Cleese) and Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir
Lancelot (Eric Idle). In my opinion, The Holy Grail should be considered as one
of the greatest comedies to come out of Britain, with satirical look of what it
may have been like in early centuries England. I think what was good about this
film is that the comedy is not shown to be intelligent but is just a surreal
comedy which doesn’t actually make sense but the audience doesn’t really
understand, this is shown with one of my personal favourite parts of the film
with each character not having a horse but a servant who clicks two coconuts
together to signify the sounds of horse shows. I believe I rate Monty Python
and the Holy Grail so highly is the simplicity of the whole production and its
eclectic and parodist nature, for example, with the idea of having a whole part
of the story continue with just a song and dance, showing a parody of many
musical films of having the whole plot device of singing to carry the
narrative.
Even though
I am a self-confused Python fan, I do have a few negative points about the film
as a whole, with the nature of the film shown to be quite lacklustre with the
idea that it is not the usual Python comedy from the original Flying Circus
series. Also, the idea of having a periodic story telling through a book does
go with the whole ethos of the story, however, I believe this was just to show
off the witticisms of each of the pythons. But this use of juxtaposing each
characters journey with zany one liners and the whole beginning credits with
what looks like Swedish instantly catapults the film into cult classic status,
with the idea of the different story lines may have influenced some of the more
intelligent films of today like Memento with its impossible storyline.
I
suppose, the film just shows the importance of the whole Python era in the 60s
and 70s and how influential they have been, even the very mention of the ‘rabbit
scene’ from this film will get any regular comedy and Python fan into
hysterical laughter just thinking about it, but alas, the film industry is not
as it once was by recycling the norm within Hollywood like Adam Sandler and
friends making even more hand banging-ly bad Grown Up films where the
characters are actually laughing at their own jokes. On the other hand, with
Holy Grail, it creates, what Baudrillard would call, ‘hyperreailty’ where it doesn’t
actually follow the real story of King Arthur as they decide not to go to Camelot
because ‘it is a silly place’. It just shows the comedic genius of each of the
Pythons as they can create their own branch of comedy films and can keep even
more generations laughing 40 years on. For me to be able to rate this film in
just five stars would be an understatement to the Python’s genius, but it’s at
least five out of five. You don’t have to take my advice but just go by what
the creators said themselves, ‘You can do worse than
see it’.
