Life Is Beautiful

Robert Benigni uses laughter to fight the horrors of the Holocaust.

Written and directed by Roberto Benigni
A Miramax release

Recommended

The concept is more perplexing than offensive: a comedy about the Holocaust? The insanity of World War II has been turned into comedy before, from the death's-head-grin cynicism of Stalag 17 to the more overt farce of To Be Or Not To Be, not to mention the dozens of cheaply made anti-Axis propaganda movies which derided the Nazis as bumbling buffoons soon to be overtaken by Allied might. But even the bleakest farces have studiously avoided the mention of genocide. There is still no worse insult than to call someone a Nazi, no more invidious comparison than to liken someone to Hitler. The Holocaust is enshrined in our cultural memory as the supreme example of ultimate evil.

The task writer/director/actor Roberto Benigni has set himself with Life is Beautiful, then, is a formidable one. Although the film hardly makes fun of the Holocaust, it sets out to prove that it is possible to keep high spirits in the face of immutable evil, and that there may in fact be no braver feat. Benigni's character Guido is a simple, good-natured Jew; a gentle soul whose constant cheer is a courageous facade, a device to prevent his young son, Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini), from ever guessing the truth about the nightmare their world has become.

The first third of the movie is the lightest: a courtship ballet in which Guido tries to win the heart of Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, who, like Benigni, may be most familiar to American audiences from Jim Jarmusch films). They first meet when she falls out of the sky (well, a hay loft to be exact), and he quickly nicknames her Principessa (Princess). Through a series of daffy charades, he wins her heart.

Years pass, and Guido and Dora have a young son, Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini). Things in Italy have gotten worse, and Giosué asks questions no parent should have to answer. Why is there a sign in the store that says "No Jews or Dogs"? Well, Guido quickly explains, some people have funny tastes. After all, hasn't he been thinking of putting up a "No Spiders or Visigoths" sign in his own bookstore?

After the family is taken to a work camp, keeping the truth from Giosué becomes infinitely harder. Guido must explain to his son who the mean-looking men with guns are, why they are constantly yelling, and why, eventually, there are no more children in the camp. Desperate, the father happens upon an ingenious solution. They are all here to play a game, he tells Giosué, one in which crying and begging for food are strictly not allowed. Guido is not lying, exactly. He merely avoids telling his son that the penalty for losing the game is death.

As Guido's uncle, who is later sent to the gas chamber, tells him, "Nothing is more necessary than the unnecessary." In other words, laughter is never more needed than when it is inappropriate. In trying to boost Giosué's spirits, Guido is also trying to hold onto that part of himself which thinks about more than survival, that part which is most human. Life is Beautiful is Benigni's way of trying to remind us to do the same.

Life is Beautiful is both soft-hearted and rigorously anti-sentimental, Chaplinesque in a way Chaplin's own take on the war, The Great Dictator, never is. Still, those moments in which life is beautiful are those in which small cracks appear in Guido's elegantly constructed false smile, when the strain is too much for even this seemingly unflappable free spirit. As they are being marched to the camp, Giosué demands to know their destination. Guido thinks fast, then responds, "We're going on a trip. I promised your mother I wouldn't tell you where." Then, when he is sure Giosué isn't looking, Guido turns to his uncle and asks, in a lost voice akin to his son's, and asks, "Do you know where they're taking us?"

Life is Beautiful is inconceivable without the more serious films that have been made about the Holocaust. As different as they are, Life is Beautiful could not exist without Schindler's List, or Shoah. To a certain extent, the film treats its audience as Guido treats Giosué, shielding us from the true horror of the Holocaust. No one dies on screen, no one is beaten or raped. Those who are exterminated merely vanish, like exiting stage left. There is, obviously, no way the film could have supported its comedic aspects while staging the full terror of genocide, but it could perhaps have more effectively evoked the bleakness of the camps, perhaps by using stylization in the manner of last year's movie-version of Bent. Instead, some of the camp scenes are at times precariously close to seeming like school plays with too few extras; the sense of scale is what's missing, which is of course what differentiates the Nazi murder of the Jews (and gypsies and homosexuals) from other attempts at genocide. Still, because it does not wholly succeed does not mean Life is Beautiful fails, but it does mean that the film is more of an addendum than a fully realized, self-contained work.