Life is Beautiful Review
by Kevin Patterson (kevinp AT Princeton DOT EDU)March 18th, 1999
Film review by Kevin Patterson
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL
Rating: ***1/2 (out of four)
PG-13, 1998
Director: Roberto Benigni
Screenplay: Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni
Starring Cast: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini
Roberto Benigni's LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL takes "dark comedy" to entirely new levels. It is clearly a humorous film, making good use of Benigni's comic talents, yet nearly half of it takes place in a Nazi concentration camp, and it does have something very worthwhile to say about the Holocaust. At its roots, this is a story about how someone who is leading a relatively peaceful, ordinary life suddenly has it stripped away, and how such a person struggles to make sense out of the unimaginable human cruelty that he witnesses. It just so happens that this character is Guido Orefice, an Italian Jewish waiter who seems like he must have once been a circus clown and is frankly a little nuts.
For the first hour, we are introduced to Guido and his life in 1939 Italy--after Mussolini's takeover, but before the worst days of World War II and the Holocaust--as he meets and falls in love with Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), a grade school teacher. Guido is able to live a happy life for the most part. So far, his freedom has not been curtailed very strictly. He can't quite consider himself equal to the non-Semitic Italian citizens, but it's mostly limited to passing insults and subtle forms of discrimination. Benigni is a talented actor, and he succeeds at getting us to like Guido and his friends through his various bizarre stunts and comic routines, while at the same time showing the audience the creeping inhuman racism that is becoming more and more a part of everyday life in Italy. Then we jump forward to 1944. He and Dora are married, and they have a young son named Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini). But Italy is a slightly more threatening place now. Armed troops patrol the streets day and night, and few people will shop at the bookstore that Guido now operates because he is Jewish.
Suddenly, one day the German army arrives and puts an abrupt end to the life they once knew: the order has come down for Guido and Giosue to be arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Dora is exempt since she isn't Jewish, but when she learns what happens, she finds the train that they are on and insists to the Nazis that she be taken to the same camp. When they arrive there, Guido can't bring himself to explain to Giosue what's happening. How, after all, do you tell a 5-year-old that an insane racist dictator has decided that he is a sub-human because he is Jewish, or that he now lives in a place where the tiniest transgression probably means death in a gas chamber or a crematorium? So, instead, Guido tells Giosue that they are playing a strange sort of game, with all kinds of rules that lead to either addition or subtraction of points. Hiding from the guards earns you a lot of points, while crying or being hungry or wanting your mother will cost you quite a few. Whenever Giosue comes close to realizing what's really going on, Guido invents another set of rules to explain it, or tells him that the other prisoners are making things up to try to get him to lose points.
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL has been criticized by some who claim that it makes a joke of the Holocaust. The thing I realized as I watched the film, however, is that--and I'll explain this as carefully as possible so as to avoid offending anyone--in a way, the Holocaust *is* a joke. Certainly an unimaginably cruel one, and not one that really makes you laugh, but nevertheless a joke in that it is fundamentally absurd and ridiculous. In one scene that is simultaneously hilarious and sad, the guards ask who among the prisoners knows German, because they want to explain the camp's regulations to the Italian prisoners. Guido, not wanting Giosue to hear the real regulations, claims he can speak German and proceeds to translate the guard's instructions with things like, "We play the parts of the big mean guys who scream all the time. Avoiding us gets you 50 points. And no complaining for more food! The other day I complained and ate two whole meals' worth and lost 100 points!"
Obviously this is brilliant tragicomedy in its own right, but think about the implications here. Are the rules Guido is inventing any more ludicrous than the idea of uncooperative prisoners being gassed to death in a shower? If someone claimed this was happening in the United States as we speak, wouldn't you laugh at them? Recently, while surfing the Internet, I came across a web site which claimed that the Freemasons had built an elaborate underground base under the Denver Airport where reptile aliens were using abducted children as slave labor and then eating them when they became too weak to continue working. Once I got past the initial shock at the horrific imagery, I must admit my next reaction was to laugh. Not because I find the idea of aliens eating children inherently humorous, of course, but because it seemed funny that anyone could actually come up with such a ridiculous idea in the first place. Is Nazism any more inherently farcical than this? I don't think so. The only real difference is that, somehow, Nazism actually happened, whereas (let's hope) this alien invasion is just a paranoid fantasy. What Benigni has realized, I think, is that while it is understandably a sensitive subject, it is no less deserving of mockery and satire than these other examples of ideological lunacy. In fact, in one scene, when Giosue has heard about the crematorium from other prisoners, Guido convinces him they were lying simply by arguing that the story is too crazy to be believed.
Part of the reason it seems so farcical, of course, is that it is so difficult to imagine such abject and inhuman evil existing in a world that most people take for granted as a basically decent place. Guido does what he does mostly for the sake of his son, but we get the feeling that he himself kind of wants to believe that this is all just some ridiculous game. The only time that he comes face to face with one of the infamous piles of skeletons that have become known to most of us through various Holocaust documentaries, he and Giosue are wandering through a thick nighttime fog, and he is mumbling to himself that perhpas it is all a dream. This is also, I think, the purpose of the first hour of the film, which in my opinion has been unfairly maligned by critics as being too silly and slight in comparison to the Holocaust horrors that follow. It's not just character development: it's also establishing the stark contrast between the relatively pleasant (though increasingly restricted) life that Guido's family led in comparison to the misery of the concentration camp. We may find ourselves wondering how the film can shift so suddenly in tone, and, by extension, how these things can all exist in the same world.
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL doesn't quite earn four stars from me, mostly because I had a little trouble actually accepting the premise, however thought-provoking it may be. Little children may be gullible, but they can still tell when they are surrounded by misery and suffering, and they would not stay willingly in such a place regardless of what their parents may tell them. Giosue protests that he doesn't want to play the game any more at one point, but Guido manages to calm him down a little too easily. Logically, I think he'd have reached a point where he would have insisted that they stop regardless of the consequences or the possible rewards of winning the game, and I certainly don't think he'd have made it through more than a few days at the camp without crying or begging for his mother.
Nazism has been portrayed many times over in various art forms, usually with an understandably grim seriousness. I can't recall anyone ever addressing it with the bitter and viciously mocking satire that it receives in LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, however, and Benigni is to be praised for his creative and intelligent approach to such a difficult subject.
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