LA VITA E BELLA (LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL)
A film review by Eric Scharf
Copyright 1998 Eric Scharf
Italy, 1997 U.S. release date: 10/23/98 Running length: 2:02 MPAA Rating: PG-13
Cast: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giustino Durano, Giorgio Cantarini, Horst Buchholz Director: Roberto Benigni Producers: Gianluigi Braschi, Mario Cotone, and Elda Ferri Screenplay: Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni U.S. Distributor: Miramax Films
TRAGEGY PLUS NOT ENOUGH TIME
The scene: a Nazi concentration camp. Michael Palin is in a SS uniform, clipboard in hand. He asks each of a queue of prisoners, "Zyklon B?" Each replies, "Yes," and Palin says reassuringly, "Good; out the door, shower on the left, one bar of soap each." Eventually he gets to Eric Idle, who when asked, "Zyklon B?" replies "Ah, no, freedom" Flustered at the novelty, Palin asks, "What?" Idle explains, "Uh, freedom for me. They said that there was nothing really wrong with being a Jew, so they said I could go free and get on a plane to England." Palin is confused, but no less pleased for Idle for it; "Oh, well, that's jolly good. Well, off you go, then." Idle relents, though, "No, I'm only pulling your leg--it's Zyklon B really." Palin is amused (and relieved), "Oh I see, very good, very good. Well, out the door--" Idle enthusiastically finishes Palin's sentence for him, "I know--out the door, shower on the left, one bar of soap each," and bounds out the door. The disruption over, Palin turns his comforting mien to the next prisoner.
Is the above any less funny than the Roman crucifixion version featured in "Life of Brian"? To me, it is (slightly). And that "slightly" is, ultimately, what will determine whether one can enjoy La Vita e bella as fully as the Cannes jury apparently did. Roberto Benigni's comic farce set in Fascist Italy from 1939 to 1945 has been met with both unqualified praise and righteous indignation, neither of which forms a satisfactory response to the vexing challenge posed by Benigni's artistic choice.
The first half of "La Vita e bella" is a romantic comedy as Benigni's character Guido arrives in a Tuscan town to take a position as a waiter in his uncle's restaurant and save up money to open a bookstore. This latter ambition is thwarted by the bureaucratic hostility of Rodolfo, the local Fascist potentate (Amerigo Fontani); meanwhile, the bulk of Guido's energy is devoted to the pursuit of Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), who is of course engaged to Rodolfo. Awareness of the racist climate creeps in when Guido impersonates a Fascist inspector at Dora's school in order to arrange a date with her, and finds himself expected to give a lecture on the superiority of the Aryan race. The hilarious satire that results marks the high-water mark of Benigni's attempt to marry his slapstick genius with the historical reality of the Holocaust. Subsequent foreshadowing seems insultingly mild; our first notice of Guido's Jewishness is occasioned by the "vandalism" visited upon his uncle: his horse is painted green and labeled "Achtung! Jewish horse!" Kristallnacht this is not. Eventually (and very entertainingly), Guido wins out and convinces Dora to marry him instead.
Flash forward five years: Guido and Dora are married, they have a son, Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini), and Guido owns his bookstore (Rodolfo must have left town in shame rather than use his formidable resources to harry Guido). When Giosue asks why certain businesses have signs stating "No dogs or Jews allowed", rather than giving his son a useful lesson on the perils of being Jewish in an anti-Semitic society, Guido makes a joke about how they will put up a sign in their store stating "No spiders or Visigoths." One day, Dora comes home to find that Guido, his uncle, and Giosue have been arrested. In order to spare his son the reality of what is about to happen to them (!), Guido decides to pretend that everyone in the camp is competing in a contest, the grand prize being a real, life-size tank, and that by hiding from the guards (who "aren't really mean; that's just they way they have to act in order to win the game"), Giosue will help them earn points toward victory. Dora gallantly demands to be let on the same train with her family, which helps Giosue believe his father's fabrication. Rather than being a desperate struggle to avoid death, however, the film remains a comic farce as the SS guards are straight men to be mocked by Guido, and the other prisoners merely part of the scenery (or worse, obstacles to Guido's fantasy, as when one inconsiderately tells Giosue that "they make buttons and soap out of us", providing another occasion for Guido to make fun of industrial-scale murder).
My poor reaction to the second half of the film is particularly vexing, as I have long protested against any tendency to apotheosize the Holocaust as the single greatest evil in history, to set it beyond the realm of comparison with other human atrocities. To do so, to call the Holocaust "inhuman", to claim that the hatred, cowardice, and submission of individual conscience to group "will" exhibited in Nazi-dominated Europe is qualitatively different from that displayed in other atrocities before and since, is to blind oneself to the very human qualities that made the Holocaust possible, and therefore to invite it to happen again. I am therefore hard-pressed to explain why Benigni made me uncomfortable and Monty Python did not.
It's not as if I'm (over-)sensitive to distasteful subject matter in films. I cheered the poetic justice at the cannibalistic climax of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover". More recently, I was genuinely sympathetic to the plights of Dylan Baker's and Philip Seymour Hoffman's characters in "Happiness", and when Ian McKellen's Nazi war criminal in "Apt Pupil" maneuvered the film's title character into finding out, first-hand, just "what it was like," I cackled right along with McKellen. So why couldn't I let myself be charmed by Benigni's undoubted comedic talents into accepting the film's triumphant conclusion?
Despite today's marketers' ham-fisted-best attempts to spin-target film trailers and commercials, there's really no longer any excuse for film-goers not to know what they're getting into. While the number of films that I have walked out of (or wish that I had) prior to film's end can be counted on one hand, my awareness of the film's controversial plot no doubt spared me the rude surprise that must have befallen the handful of people who walked out of "La Vita e bella" (much fewer, it must be said, than walked out of any of the three films mentioned above). This awareness, however, primed me to be on the alert for any attempt by Benigni to dilute the Holocaust to make room for his buffoonery. But why should I care? Perhaps I was afraid that Benigni's film could not avoid appearing to say that more Jews would have survived the camps had they memorized more Buster Keaton routines. Another viewer offered the interpretation that the film's concentration camp scenes are to be seen as the perspective of the five-year-old Giosue. This is a cogent point, as I was fully able to enjoy the child's perspective on the London Blitz in John Boorman's "Hope and Glory" (to be sure, Boorman never pretended that the Luftwaffe dropped cotton candy).
I have come to conclude that the historical context of the last fifty years prevents me from not insisting on deadly accuracy in every depiction of the Holocaust. Paradoxically, while the Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented genocides in history, its authenticity has come under the most venomous attack. I was born 23 years after the last camp was liberated, yet that's not long enough for me to be untouched by the mandate, "Never Forget." Benigni isn't exempt from this, either; he's not some ignorant American high school student turning in a paper claiming the Holocaust wasn't as bad as everyone says. When Guido comically mistranslates the German guard's instructions to the prisoners in order to establish the "rules of the game" for Giosue, Benigni wants us to forget that their fellow prisoners will suffer for their ignorance of camp regulations. When Guido and his son take over the camp's PA system to wish a happy birthday to Dora in the women's barracks, Benigni wants us to forget that, as a consequence, Giosue will most surely be discovered and gassed. When Guido is sprinting about in drag in order to reunite his family just prior to the camp's liberation, Benigni wants us to forget that by war's end few prisoners possessed the strength to walk, let alone pratfall.
I recognize that my inability to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust is a cultural artifact, part of a historical context populated by both camp survivors and virulent revisionists. If there were any doubt that Benigni does not also share this context, it is dispelled by the fact that the moral that Benigni proposes we draw from "La Vita e bella", that in the face of hardship and cruelty beyond our control we are responsible only for the bravery of the individual spirit, is straight out of the Existential tradition that followed the Second World War. Where Benigni's philosophy fails is that that same tradition requires an honest confrontation with the horrors of the human condition, which Benigni denies us in "La Vita e bella" (a phrase from Trotsky, written while awaiting assassination by Stalin's thugs).
Perhaps in another fifty years, when all the survivors and anyone who knew them are gone, it will no longer be distasteful to make a vaudeville out of Auschwitz. Part of me feels that's all it is, a matter of taste. There are plenty of people, from critics to film-makers to ordinary folk, who think Benigni's comic talents and his life-affirming message transcend the historical inaccuracies of the film, and I know enough of them well enough to be unable to dismiss them as morally handicapped. My difficulties with "La Vita e bella" will certainly not prevent me from enjoying Benigni's other work, nor will I deny that the poeticism of the film's final scene makes a compelling case for Benigni's excellent craftsmanship as a film-maker. I admire Benigni, and I'm in awe of what he thought he was attempting. In an era which most of the film industry's attention and money goes to abominations like "Armageddon" and "Pleasantville", it's hard to accuse "La Vita e bella" of poor taste. I will therefore settle for accusing it of poor timing.
-- Eric Scharf http://www.halcyon.com/demiurge/ http://www.halcyon.com/demiurge/lavitaebella.html
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews