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Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful is undeniably some sort of feat — the first feel-good Holocaust weepie. It's been a long time coming. Any veteran art-house patron will probably, by now, have sat through more films about the Holocaust than he or she can count. The reason hardly needs stating — it's the defining atrocity of the 20th century — yet these movies have also come to constitute a kind of cinematic universe unto themselves. It's that universe, I think, that begets a picture like Life Is Beautiful, which has the audacity — or is it insensitivity? — to place its lovable clownish hero in a death camp that looks like something out of a '50s musical. You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll smile through the evils of genocide!
Benigni, whose moonstruck mug and receding flyaway hair make him resemble a warmer version of the young Woody Allen, plays Guido, a winsome Jewish-Italian rogue who, with nothing but a few farm eggs in his pocket, arrives in a picturesque Tuscan village on the eve of World War II. Before long, this rube-in-the-piazza meets a pretty schoolteacher (Nicoletta Braschi) and, gloriously smitten, does everything he can to win her. Benigni is a performer of ebullient, if sometimes strenuous, charm. He grins, he gawks, he takes intricate pratfalls, but, mostly, he talks, in a voluble stream of patter. As cowriter and director, he also succeeds, to an extraordinary degree, in reviving the neo-Technicolor lushness and affectionate screwball rhythms of postwar Hollywood. The first hour of Life Is Beautiful is genuinely lovely, a delicate romance spiked with antifascist farce. When Benigni hilariously impersonates a Mussolini-regime official, the scene owes an obvious debt to The Great Dictator, but Benigni earns the comparison.
And then? Then our hero, having won his girl, married her, and had a son, is carted off to a concentration camp. Have no fear: In Life Is Beautiful, the place resembles nothing so much as the soundstage for a ballet set in Auschwitz, complete with gray-striped uniforms that now seem weirdly like costumes. Guido spends the rest of the film shielding his little boy from the brutality that surrounds them, pretending that it's all literally just an elaborate game. There's only one problem: As shot, it looks like a game. We don't see any brutality, either (though there is one ghostly image of corpses), and so the film, stylizing reality to an insane degree, treats us like children, too. In Life Is Beautiful, Benigni transforms the Holocaust into a grimly tidy postcard — he vacuums it of meaning. The film starts out as sentimental whimsy and ends as sentimental kitsch. As the century winds down, though, that may be just what audiences want: to see horror made harmless — turned into nothing but a movie. B-
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Plot: In this WW II tragicomedy, famed Italian funnyman Roberto Benigni (The Monster) portrays Guido, who moves during the '30s from the country to a Tuscan town, where he is entranced by schoolteacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife). Dora likes Guido, but she remains faithful to her pompous fiancé, so Guido has an uphill struggle. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic attitudes lead to attacks against Guido's Jewish uncle (Giustino Durano). Leaping ahead to five years later, during WW II, Guido and Dora are married and have a son Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini). After they are imprisoned in a concentration camp, Guido goes to elaborate lengths to keep his son from understanding the truth of their situation. He tells the boy that they are competing with others to win an armored tank -- so everything from food shortages to tattoos is explained as necessary for participation in the contest. ~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
Review: Life is Beautiful caused more than a little controversy when it was released: any attempt to make comedy out of the Holocaust is going to inspire strong reactions from critics and audience members. Love it or loathe it, Life is Beautiful inarguably made an international star out of Italian comedian Roberto Benigni, who wrote, directed, and starred in it. One of his country's most celebrated comedians, Benigni was previously known for his work in numerous Italian comedies, as well as Johnny Stecchino and Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law and Night on Earth. Life is Beautiful's Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by Benigni's Best Actor Oscar and acceptance speech (in exuberant, skillfully broken English), made Benigni possibly Italy's most famous export since the Fiat. Although some viewers found the film's second half, set almost entirely in a concentration camp, to be well-meaning but misguided, the film's first half is indisputably enjoyable. Revolving around the courtship of an aristocratic lady nicknamed the Principessa by Benigni's Guido, it makes a refreshing, elegantly hilarious love story. Somewhat ironically, the film's wittiest and most accurate commentary on fascism and religious oppression is contained here, rather than in the concentration camp setting. Benigni's comedy here becomes a tool for side-splitting yet razor-sharp criticism, and this first section powerfully establishes the reality of everyday life disrupted by the war. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
Laughing in the face of adversity is the best way to triumph over it. This is a sentiment I share with Roberto Benigni, director of Life is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) the only movie to ever make me laugh out loud and leave me with sad tears in my eyes.
The film has two parts to it. In the first part Benigni, who also co-wrote the script with Vincenzo Cerami, plays Guido, a waiter working for his uncle who owns a hotel in Italy. He keeps bumping (literally) into his principessa Dora (Nicoletta Braschi). By staging an elaborate (and humourous!) series of events which make it appear as if the Virgin Mary herself is cooperating with him, Guido rescues Dora from marrying the stodgy town clerk. Life appears to be going fairly well for Guido even though Mussolini has just signed a pact with Hitler to implement his Nazi policies with regards to Jews. Flash forward five years later and we see Guido owning a bookstore he manages with his wife and son Giosué. It's almost the end of World War II, but that makes the position of Jewish-Italians all the more precipitous. One day, the Germans come to take away Guido and his son. His wife, not being Jewish, chooses to go along.
Right from the start, Guido takes a huge risk by treating the whole exercise as a joke. He explains to his son that they've just bought tickets to take part in a contest to win a tank (not a toy one, but a real one, thought of which lights up Giosué's eyes) and proceeds to concoct an imaginative and humourous explanation for the happenings around, and to, them in the German concentration camp.
All of the things Guido asks Giosué to do are in the interest of saving Giosué. However, given Guido's personality depicted in the first half of the film, I don't think he could've acted differently even if wanted to. While the first part of the movie illustrates Benigni's talents as a slapstick comedian, some of the best humour is in the German camp. Here, Guido is not only funny to his son (and the audience) but he must also eke out humour in situations where people's lives are stake. We see Guido making a joke out of a German officer's instructions to the prisoners---a situation where a misunderstanding on the part of the prisoner could lead to their deaths.
Some may find this comparison sacrilegious, but Benigni reminds me of Jim Carrey in many respects. From his "performance" at the Oscars (climbing on chairs and rivalling Whoopi Goldberg in his one-liners), I assume Benigni very much lives his life the way he portrays Guido in Life is Beautiful, always cheerful, goofy, and smiling at and in the face of misfortune. Benigni's acting is terrific and believable. (As I write this, it's well-known that Life is Beautiful won the Oscar not only for Best Foreign Film, but Nicola Piovani won an Oscar for the Best Original Dramatic Score and Benigni won the Best Actor award.) The chemistry between Benigni and Braschi, who happens to Benigni's real-life wife, is excellent. The cinematography, the direction, and the pacing are all superb, except for the odd scene where Guido gets lost in the prison camp (which isn't that big) and stumbles across a pile of decaying corpses that have been through the gas showers. It is a jarring scene that simply does not fit in with the rest of the film.
The movie has been criticised as an exercise in holocaust revisionism. In my view, the fantasy Benigni creates (and it is a fantasy) is done primarily to enable us to laugh at one of the most terrible atrocities to occur in human history.
It's debatable how much children (or anyone) should be shielded from real-life horrors (I'm of the belief that it's generally better to know sooner than later), but in this fable, Guido's gamble (with a high risk) pays off. The emotional ending which made me cry is all the more powerful because up till the end, we do not know what is really going to happen. And given that most of the films I see comes out of Hollywood, I was shaking my head in disbelief long after the movie ended. This is the kind of a movie I've waited for a long time to be made and in my view deserved the Oscars for all the categories it was nominated for but didn't win. In so much as comparisons can be made, Life is Beautiful is a better picture than Shakespeare in Love and Benigni does a better job of direction than Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan.
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