The Zero Theorem

Ah, the auteur director. So very few of them left and even fewer whose work attracts A-list stars and audiences. Which is a little strange when you think about it. So much of Hollywood's output conforms to readily identifiable tropes and structures that you might imagine actors and viewers alike would long for visual and narratological deviance. I'll work on a theory about this at some point but first I have to stand in this field all year round and eat grass.

Apparently Terry Gilliam, the modern era's auteuriest director, isn't keen on The Zero Theorem being considered the third in a thirty-five year trilogy that started with Brazil and notched up Twelve Monkeys before 2013 saw the release of this, possibly the oddest of the three. So is it lazy journalism to point to the continuity of perspective, of dystopian aura and of a search for individual meaning within culturally trivialised lives? Maybe. I said it anyway.

Although visually Christoph Waltz appears to be auditioning for a future casting as Uncle Fester, his character, Qohen, is a theoretical cleverclogs tasked with solving the titular theorem whilst simultaneously being distracted by the initially unwelcome companionship of a PVC-clad Melanie Thierry (loved her work at Arsenal) and an arrogant neo-genius who calls everyone Bob because it's easier to remember his own name than learn other people's. It could be argued, then, that his search for meaning takes in a slow but genuine acceptance of a disjointed form of nuclear family with Thierry as love interest and Bob boy as surrogate child. Aww, connection and human affection equates to meaning. Excuse me while I fill this small bag with vomit.

No, I'm not that cynical. Love is a splendoured thing and comes in many forms. Gilliam knows this but is never so crass as to simply toss off a quirky family values fable for the money. Not even if the money is super big. Probably. And hey, if he has done exactly that with The Zero Theorem at least he's coaxed David Thewliss into his best performance since that cameo in The Big Lebowski.

None of Terry Gilliam's films are fully comprehensible on a single viewing; they are the cinematic equivalent of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, lurid, garish and groaning with sumptuous detail in every corner of every frame, requiring repeated scrutiny. Are they also moralistic? Yes, if you acknowledge that few of his movies hold back on criticism of the cultural values we are daily served up as ethical and habitual normalities within Western societies. Despite the broad palette of his oeuvre one of the unifying messages in his work is that notwithstanding the depersonalisation and alienation inherent to our world, human connection continues to occur in the unlikeliest of circumstances, lending authentic meaning to everyday mundanity.

Or you can replace the dialogue of every one of his movies with The Doors' 'People Are Strange' without doing too much damage to their impact. This patch of grass is lovely. I could quite happily eat it and eat it until such time as I am slaughtered and served up as somebody's supper.

Monty Python And The Holy Grail

Monty Python's Flying Circus began to air when I was a tiny, tiny boy. I doubt I saw or heard a thing. But a few years later I did hear things, strange voices coming from my older brother's bedroom. He had bought, or been given, Matching Tie and Handkerchief, a record containing the voices of the Pythons, performing variations on some of their television sketches as well as brand new material which would only have worked as audio anyway. I was entranced. I was in hysterics, I barely understood a word when it came to the social comment and satire but what I did take in I memorised and spouted back to school friends the following day. They fell about laughing too.

I should explain. I have a decent ear and tongue for mimicry and a habit for echolalia which ensured my regurgitated Pythonisms were pretty accurate and definitely inspired some of my mates to ransack their older siblings record collections too. 

And then the BBC benevolently began to repeat the television shows from the beginning, all the way through to the final series, the one in which John Cleese did not appear but, if memory serves, sketches about eating beans and farting, and the Spam song did. You might imagine there could be no higher level to reach for an eight or nine year old Pythonist than to be able to watch them do silly walks and fail to sell a scrap of cheese on TV as well as listening to them on record any time I chose (Matching Tie and Handkerchief was swiftly followed in our household by several other Python records including the hilarious and slightly swearier Live At Drury Lane). But you'd be wrong. Because in 1974, in a rare fit of decent parenting, my father took my brother and I to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail at the cinema!

Whichever Beatles album I listen is my favourite while I am listening to it. Whichever pre-Parenthood Steve Martin film I watch is my favourite while I am watching it. I have no favourite amongst the five different men who have captained Liverpool football club to five separate victories in the European Champion's Cup. I have some preferences when it comes to who plays Doctor Who but basically love them all and love the show forever and ever. But when it comes to Python movies, no matter how brilliant I know the others are, Holy Grail is...well it's the Holy Grail of films by Monty Python.

A word of warning. If you like Python but loathe those who sit there watching their movies reciting every line simultaneously with the cast onscreen, do not ever watch Holy Grail with me. You'll hate me, I'll tell you to go and do something physically painful to your rectum and we may never mend our friendship again. Best if you go and watch something else on the iPlayer. Or set fire to an effigy of me. I can't help it. Remember what I said about mimicry and echolalia? It's quite possibly medical so play nice and stop hitting me.

Knock, knock, knock. Penny! Knock, knock, knock. Penny! Oh wait, that's something else.

The Holy Grail is quite simply the silliest, funniest, Grailiest, Pythoniest film there has ever been. Or will ever be again. Apart from their other films but minus the Grail bits. Much of what I now call my own political perspective can be blamed on the movie too: 

"Autonomous dictatorship comes from a mandate from the people, not some farcical aquatic ceremony."

"How do you know he's a king?" "Because he hasn't got shit all over him."

The movie is quite possibly also responsible for me knowing what the term 'oral sex' meant by that age. And for teaching me that to some people being spanked is not a torment but a sexual pleasure (not for me, thanks, I'm a Quaker). It is most certainly fully responsible for the fact that when people are arguing loudly and pointlessly I feel an impulse to shout "She turned me into a newt." After which I would obviously wait for a stunned silence to ensue and eventually add "I got better."

I might not have learnt much genuine Arthurian mythology from this film but I did learn something far more valuable; all mythology is open to ridicule. Myth, even if it is based on a tiny percentage of fact, becomes quite risible to succeeding generations who fail to recognise their own cultural risibility because clothing, fashions, languages and social behaviours ebb and flow like excreta spiralling along an open medieval sewer.

Most people don't come to Python for the cultural education. They come for the silly voices, the maniacal set-pieces, the slapstick and the references to bodily functions. And why not? But to overlook the way even an historical piece like Holy Grail says as much about the early 1970s as it says about the Dark Ages, is to overlook the fact that as well as being hilarious and suspiciously fond of cross-dressing for a role, the Pythons were/are highly intelligent people with a great deal of social awareness. 

What's that you say? You don't agree with me? Then I fart in your general direction! I wave my private parts at your aunty. Your mother was a hamster and...(it may be best if you sod off now, I can keep this up all night).

The Fisher King

If there is a unifying link between the greatest performances of the late Robin Williams it is sudden death. Oh and outrageous comedic characterisation of course. Which makes two links. The two unifying links between the varied great performances of the late Robin Williams are sudden death, outrageous comedic characterisation and improvisation. Argh, that’s three. I’ll go out and come back in again.

Yes, I did steal from Monty Python’s ‘The Spanish Inquisition’ sketch. I did so knowingly as for me the pinnacle of Williams’ movie career, a film which encapsulates all three of the above elements, was directed by Terry Gilliam who appears in said Python sketch. The Film is Gilliam’s 1991 masterpiece, The Fisher King.

Ostensibly a vehicle for the superb Jeff Bridges, the show is nonetheless stolen by the increasingly important character of Parry played with almost Mork-like other-worldliness by Williams. Bridges plays Jack Lucas, a loudmouth shock jock whose challenging approach to a regular freakish phone-in caller prompts the caller to enter a Manhattan bar  and indiscriminately murder several yuppies. Lucas, horrified that his casually dismissive outpourings could inspire such horror slides into alcoholism and despair.

Three years later, intending to kill himself, Lucas heads for a dingy part of New York but before he can take his own life he is set upon by a gang of thugs who intend to set fire to him. Rescue comes in the shape of a homeless man, Parry, who later confides in Lucas that he is on a mission to find The Holy Grail. Parry wants to recruit the reluctant former DJ who only agrees when he realises that Parry is actually the widower of a woman who had been killed in the Manhattan murders.

A Grail Quest set in the heart of late twentieth-century New York is pure Gilliam, naturally, but the credence lent by Williams to a character obsessed with the fable of The Fisher King (an Arthurian style myth which was at the time being re-appropriated into certain psychological readings of the male archetype) is what allows the plot to truly fly. Well, that and some superb cinematography, with the scene of countless commuters waltzing through Grand Central Station serving as a perfect metaphor for the powerful attraction Parry has allowed himself to feel for Lydia, a shy accountant who is as yet unaware of Parry’s affections for her.

Lucas believes that he can settle his own conscience if he helps Parry and sets up a date with Lydia. Things seem to go well until Parry is visited by a recurrent hallucinatory presence throughout the movie, the Red Knight. In running to escape his tormentor, Parry encounters the same gang who had attacked Lucas and is beaten unconscious. He falls into a catatonic state in hospital, an echo of the self-induced psychological catatonia he had suffered after the murder of his wife.

Unable to rid himself of a sense of responsibility, Lucas uses Parry’s plans to locate the ‘Grail’ which is in reality a trophy kept in the house of a wealthy city businessman. He breaks into the businessman’s house, steals the trophy and brings it to the hospital. The Fisher King, re-established on his God-given quest to guard the Grail wakes up becoming something of a hybrid of his earlier days and the freer spirit of his time as a homeless man.

When the movie was made it is doubtful anyone but Williams could have captured the duality and insanity of Parry’s character so successfully. Indeed, the casting throughout is incredible, from Bridges to Amanda Plummer as Lydia to Mercedes Ruehl as the big-hearted woman who takes the broken former DJ into her life. The film also boasts a fine cameo from Tom Waits as a wounded Vietnam veteran beggar doubling as  a kind of Tiresian seer.

Without Williams at the heart of the movie, however, it is doubtful the end result would be so entirely satisfying. His presence adds extra effect to the fact that, unusually for Gilliam films at the time, the conclusion is unambiguously hopeful, even happy.

There is of course a notorious scene in which a naked Robin Williams flops his genitalia around in Central Park in the middle of the night, ‘setting the little fellow free’ as he puts it. Now I have always loved the man, pretty much been in love with him since first seeing him as insane alien Mork on the small screen, yet the sight of his naked body did not make me question my own sexuality in the way, perhaps, a nude Paul Newman might have done when he was in his prime.

What The Fisher King does make the discerning viewer question, however, is the alleged progress humankind has made since the so-called Dark Ages. For all that modern science and technology has allowed us to believe we understand and control our world and our lives so much more effectively than any feudal subjects could have done, The Fisher King proves that we are still just victims of happenstance and prone to holding on to any form of illogical belief system in the desperate hope that it can provide meaning within a frequently meaningless existence.

It is one of my Desert Island Films (why hasn’t some TV executive seen the need to expand this radio format onto our talking picture boxes?) and now carries increased poignancy and pathos because of the tragic death of Robin Williams, apparently at his own hands. Who will guard the Grail now? Or lead us in rousing renditions of ‘How About You? which are no match for Sinatra in terms of pitch and timbre but beat him  hands down when it comes to gusto and fun. Who else but Williams can ever again combine the allegedly oppositional roles of King and Fool so successfully? It is enough to make me want to taketh myself to the off license, and purchase ye Jacketh of Daniels so that I may get shitfaced.