Animated in a variety of imaginative styles and narrated by a guy who’s been dead for 20 years, “A Liar’s Autobiography” isn’t your usual biopic. Like a lesser Python entry (“The Meaning of Life”?), it’s alternately brilliant and frustrating.
Graham Chapman, who played the lead roles in both “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” died of throat cancer at age 48 in 1989, but before he went he made recordings of his hilarious, slightly surreal memoir. The sound of his voice gives this film an appropriately irreverent feel, but if Python fans are the only ones likely to be interested, they’ll also be disappointed to learn this isn’t the place to go to find out how the great comedy was created. Like the famous cheese shop that contained no cheese, this is a Python film with hardly any Python gossip.
It’s also not clear what, if anything, in this film is actually true. (Chapman did not go to Eton as the film implies.) Yet the movie is a weirdly entertaining, quirky meditation about stardom, booze and ’70s excess. Chapman, who put away half a gallon of gin a day in the Python years (but quit long before he died) was one of the first celebs to publicly declare he was gay, and his poolside decadence inspires three directors and 14 animation studios to create images worthy of David Hockney, “Fritz the Cat” director Ralph Bakshi, “Yellow Submarine” and R. Crumb.
There’s a sense amid all these empty revels that Chapman was deeply unhappy, if appropriately blasé and ironic about it. Only in a clip from a talk show is there the slightest hint of what the underlying problem was: Chapman says he feared he didn’t really deserve his success. Could it have been that simple?