Life is Beautiful Review
by "Mark O'Hara" (mwohara AT hotmail DOT com)February 11th, 1999
Life is Beautiful (1997)
A Film Review by Mark O'Hara
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There is a moment in 'Life is Beautiful' when the clownish Guido tells the girl of his dreams what they will do that evening. He speaks as though reminiscing about a story that has become a perfect memory.
As the story progressed, I got the notion that I was watching a favorite film, one of the handful that I carry with me everywhere. Roberto Benigni's 'La Vita e Bella' follows closely its early pronouncement in a brief voice-over: it's a fable, perhaps sad and difficult to tell, but full of wonder and happiness.
Beginning in Italy in 1939, the story focuses on Guido Orefice (Benigni) and his exploits after he leaves the country for the city. He travels with a friend who is a poet as well as an upholsterer. Guido is a waiter; he's also a solver of riddles, a supreme jokester, an aficionado of life. Soon Guido happens upon Dora (Nicolletta Braschi), whom he dubs his "princess." In a clever leit motif, Guido repeatedly surprises Dora in an astonishing variety of places and ways - he's a stalker, only lovestruck and hilarious. After he wins her laughter and her heart, times passes and we see the couple with their child, four year-old Joshua. Guido has finally realized his dream of running a bookshop, although the politics of the time - the early 'forties now - dictates his bookshop shutters be identified with "Jewish Store." We catch glimpses of the happy life lived by Dora and Guido and Joshua, but it is not to last.
When Dora returns home one afternoon to find their villa ransacked and empty, the story takes a heart-breaking turn. Guido and Joshua, along with Guido's uncle, have been sent to a concentration camp. It's typical of the strength of Guido's love that he tries to protect his son from the trauma of the sudden truck- and cattle car-rides by happily deluding him. Enlisting a formidable imagination and his uncle's help, Guido constructs an elaborate lie. The trip is Joshua's birthday gift, a game during which one collects points for performing absurd and brutal duties. The Nazis are "mean guys that yell"; Joshua must hide or risk being "eliminated" from the game; the prize for amassing 1000 points is a tank, a real-life version of Joshua's favorite toy. To complicate matters, Dora has desperately found her way aboard the train and into the camp, secluded from her male family members, of course. In addition to perpetuating the myth of the game, Guido is faced with endeavoring to contact Dora, a feat he manages ingeniously.
To assert that the story is punctuated by comic relief would be irrelevant, for the film manages to sustain its humorous tone even as tragedy seeps into the narrative line. Benigni's gift to the audience is his ability to juggle the subplots, to portray farcical elements often within the same sequences as sinister ones. In one masterful tour-de-force, the crafty father pretends he is translating instructions from the camp guards to the Italian prisoners. Eyes shifting endlessly, Guido improvises incredible and silly rules; the result is his son's continuing belief in the protective charade.
Benigni 's Guido is a sweet and hyperactive man, likable long before his character is tested by prejudice and internment. Guido initiates several satirical digs at fascism, most memorably when he masquerades as a school inspector from Rome, charged with explaining to the school children the Italian claims to Aryan superiority. Benigni is goofy and intelligent at once as he mumbles about racist Italian scientists, showing his audience of "bambini" his superior belly button and superior hip before the real inspector shows up and Guido goes out a window. Here Roberto Benigni echoes the performances of the best comedians of this century in their send-ups of Hitler's and Mussolini's thugs.
As Joshua, essentially the co-star of the picture, Giorgio Cantarini is outstanding. What's remarkable is that he is so believeable in his expressions of extreme emotions. Though assisted by Benigni's knowing direction, the boy's acting never seems fake-y. One illustration occurs when Guido suddenly opens a bin in which Joshua has been hiding. We see the wide-eyed child's look of genuine excitement, almost rowdiness, that precedes surprise.
Nicoletta Braschi, as Dora, seems unattainable at first - too beautiful and socially connected for Guido the Jewish waiter. But we witness her succumb to Guido's considerable efforts, and the goodness radiates from her face. Her cast of longing and love stuns the viewer in one scene, when Guido engineers the playing of their song - an Offenbach opera - so that it's audible in the women's barracks. Her presence is heartening during the uncertain times of the film's setting, another goal to keep Guido struggling.
I've mentioned motifs already, but they warrant more. Functioning as running jokes, several gags are tied in time and time again, striking chords that are magic as well as moving. The sole criticism I can muster is that we need to see more of Dora's family's rejection of Guido. After all, Guido is the interloper who literally carries Dora away from her husband-to-be, picking her up with his uncle's "Jewish horse"! Otherwise, the dual themes of humor and menace play about the screen brilliantly.
Who will Roberto Benigni be compared with next, after Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin? That the film has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture (and not merely Best Foreign Film), and Benigni for Best Actor, Director and Screenwriter (with Vincenzo Cerami) attests to its solid stance. (The film is already the recipient of the Best Foreign Film award from the Online Film Critics Society.) 'Life is Beautiful' takes risks and, unlike a lot of lesser films, earns its tears. It is a must-see for all fans of movies, all devotees to human endurance, and all passionate lovers of this beautiful life.
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