Vancouver International Film Festival showcases the transformative genius of Russell Brand and Monty Python

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      Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuted on the BBC in 1969, a year after students rioted in France and violence rocked the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was arguably the single most volatile period in the West’s history, a prerevolutionary moment that promised to bring fucking to the streets and an enema to reactionary governments across the developed world.

      And then it was over, beaten down with billy clubs and bullets while the status quo mobilized, mounting a gargantuan counterrevolutionary push that’s still ruining your day as you read this.

      But that indestructible spirit of sweet, youthful anarchy took refuge elsewhere, even inside a low-budget sketch show that was met initially with towering indifference by the Beeb. Python decimated the comedy format—routines without punch lines, rampant surrealism, mind-altering animation—exploding the anti-Establishment impulse of its predecessors The Goon Show and Beyond the Fringe and speaking directly to a new generation in a post-hallucinogenic language only they could understand.

      Needless to say, almost 50 years later, Python’s influence is incalculable. Every British comedian that followed (and an impressive number of Americans) carries some of its DNA, including the one man who climbed to the very top of the comic mountain on a platform of inspired silliness, filth, and uncontainable ego, conquered both sides of the Atlantic, blazed through Hollywood, married the world’s biggest pop star—then threw it all away. Indeed, Russell Brand even bailed on the documentary he agreed to let Dig! director Ondi Timoner make about him, kinda.

      “He went to England to overthrow the government,” Timoner deadpans, calling the Georgia Straight from Big Sky, Montana. “And I’m in the middle of making this movie.” So she duly followed her subject to the U.K. Timoner was capturing a bigger story than she ever bargained for.

      When Brand: A Second Coming screens at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival, it’ll be on the wings of a small miracle. Timoner was initially brought in to save a project started by the comedian himself, footage from which survives in the film’s encounters between Brand and people like Mike Tyson and David Lynch. The rather nebulous subject of Brand’s movie was happiness. Timoner was ambivalent.

      “I was gonna pass on the project, and then I met Russell and he blew my mind,” she recalls, having promptly decided that she wanted to make a documentary about him. “I was, like, ‘Why is none of that guy in this footage?’ I believe he’s a genius. I have this knack for finding visionaries, or they find me. I make movies about very, very smart people. Great, impossible people, like Russell. He’s a force to be reckoned with in any situation. In any room, he’s going to be the smartest, most magnetic, most charismatic person there.”

      Of late, that very same fella has decided to put those gifts to more substantial use, but we’ll get to that. On a more mundane level, Timoner found that keeping up with the former Mr. Katy Perry was already challenging enough, once he agreed (with considerable and enduring reluctance) to accept her new direction for the movie.

      “He’s like a moving target. I don’t know what he’ll do next,” she says, sounding like somebody who’s discovered an emotion somewhere between depthless exasperation and infinite respect. There is the small matter of a film to promote, she adds with a sigh. “And he’s just disappeared from social media. He’s gone offline. He says he’s supporting this film, and I’m, like, ‘What? Telepathically?’ ”

      Notwithstanding that Brand is the one person on Earth who could probably support a film telepathically (he’s very ambitious), let it be said that A Second Coming is a magnificent achievement. Catching him as he prepared to take 2013’s Messiah Complex tour on the road was serendipitous, to say the least, as Brand was fully grappling at the time with the political consciousness that blossomed into his 2014 book, Revolution. It’s a natural endpoint for the movie, which gives us a stunningly well-assembled journey through the Brand mythos.

      Starting with his origins in a broken home in the too-perfectly named London commuter-belt town of Grays, Timoner hits all the stations of the cross: the wild ambition already cemented in hilarious videos from Brand’s teen years, the persistent challenge to authority, the drug addiction, the sex addiction (“Four times Shagger of the Year,” as he likes to point out), the scandals, the other scandals, the megastardom, the marriage, the breakup, and, finally, the emergence of a populist revolutionary who cheerfully proposes that he might sit at the end of a line stretching back through Che Guevara to Jesus Christ.

      “He wants to be Gandhi,” Timoner states, bluntly. “He wants to be a hero like that. He doesn’t want to be just a comedian. But he also is, you know, hilarious and believes, I think, in the transformative power of comedy to change the world.”

      This is where we circle back to Monty Python, whose creators, speaking of transformative, understood on some level that if language creates consciousness, then a clever bit of wordplay can act like a good psychedelic. Equally, there was something emancipating in the show’s blatant disrespect for Britain’s ruling class. But Python was never interested in anything like actual insurrection, as both Michael Palin and John Cleese are quick to remind us in Monty Python: The Meaning of Live, another unmissable doc coming to this year’s VIFF, also part of the festival’s newly minted comedy program. It’s a faintly disappointing reality when you consider that Python’s skewering of religion in Life of Brian constituted one of the 20th century’s greatest acts of cultural rebellion.

      As for Brand—who once said he enjoyed Python as a schoolboy because “you might catch a bit of tit”—he seems bent on breaking the ceiling that truthsayers like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks could only ever poke at. What’s fascinating about Brand: A Second Coming is the extent of his intelligence, the sincerity of his beliefs, and the infinity of his contradictions.

      “He cares on a global level about overthrowing the oligarchy we all live under. He truly comes from that place; he’s always come from that place,” states Timoner of a man who can simultaneously rail eloquently against consumerism as he leaves behind an unoccupied Hollywood home and purchases bits of London. And how do we figure in Brand’s more yogic inclinations? Can we accept that meditation, a spiritual technology requiring the surrender of ego, is being so devoutly promoted by that particular guy, with that particular ego? “That’s the conundrum, and I think that’s what he faces every day,” Timoner answers. “That’s what he doesn’t quite know how to cope with.”

      To his credit, nobody is more articulate about Russell Brand’s paradoxes than Russell Brand. Plus, he keeps winning the argument, as critics like Jeremy Paxman, among others, have discovered. The patriarch of British political punditry shows up in A Second Coming to quote none other than Monty Python. Brand is no messiah, Paxman says, copping one of the most quoted lines from Life of Brian, “he’s a very naughty boy.”

      Timoner remains unimpressed by attempts to trivialize her subject. “We should not underestimate Russell Brand,” she admonishes, knowing full well that he can “run rings” around Paxman and pretty much anyone else. “Those old fat cats better watch out,” she says, and the implication is clear. We might end up with fucking in the streets and government enemas after all. Let’s hope so.

      Brand: A Second Coming screens at the Playhouse on Tuesday and Wednesday (September 29 and 30). Monty Python: The Meaning of Live screens at the International Village on Friday (September 25), the Playhouse next Friday (October 2), and the Centre on October 7.

      Check out this year's film schedule and visit our guide for complete VIFF coverage.

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