Roberto Benigni is the modern-day Chaplin - quixotic, energetic and clownish. He's always surrounded by societal misfits and higher-ups who want no part of him, yet Benigni always finds a way to immerse himself in their company and conform to society's expectations, all the while still remaining buffoonish. "Life is Beautiful" is his latest film as writer-director, but this time he's confronted by a deeper reality - the Holocaust.
Benigni stars as Guido, a Jewish-Italian buffoon who continually runs into a pretty schoolteacher (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he desperately longs for. The first time, he confronts her at a farm where he makes off with some eggs. Then he makes a merry trip to one of the picturesque villages of Tuscany, seeking employment as a waiter and living with his uncle.
Of course, he keeps running into the schoolteacher, who admires his persistence. In one incredibly riotous scene, Guido impersonates an official who is to lecture a class about races. Guido makes such a spectacle of himself by undressing in front of the class and making observations about racism that practically had me falling out of my seat laughing. Guido finally wins the teacher's heart, and they get married, have a son, and run their own bookstore.
During the last hour of the film, Guido and his son are captured by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp. It is here where Guido tries to convince his son that it is all a game, a contest played by military-style officials where the grand prize is a real tank!
The first hour of "Life is Beautiful" is sweet and comical, among Benigni's finest moments on screen. It is on par with the rampant silliness of "Johnny Stecchino." The second half is not as ingenious, and I think mainly because Benigni chose a subject that is difficult to take on any comic level.
The notion is that Guido tries to shelter his son from the horrors of the Nazi death camps by accentuating that it is all a game, a farce that can be reckoned with. In doing so, Benigni has removed all the inhumanity and horror from the Holocaust - he turns it into another one of Guido's comical pranks.
Some of it is successful - I like the scene where Guido serves as translator for a German commandant who explains what the duties of the prisoners are in the camps. There is also a brief moment where Guido sees a mountainous hill of corpses, all photographed as if they were a glass painting.
By the end of the film, though, the theme of survival and sacrifice is lost when we don't really see what was lost or gained from the experience. It doesn't help that the camps and their surroundings are photographed in the same colorful, picturesque quality as the Tuscan village scenes.
"Life is Beautiful" is a paradox in theory - it presents the Holocaust as a fairytale, and expects us to laugh along with Guido. If we had seen it from Guido's son's point-of-view, the comical scenes would have worked better. His son surely would have had his own wild-eyed view of one of the century's greatest atrocities. And the last scene of the American tank arriving at the camps reeks of Spielbergian sentiment.
In general, "Life is Beautiful" does so many things right, and is often wonderful and touching. Benigni is one of the few uncommonly pleasurable actors in the movies today, and he has agreeable chemistry with his real-life wife Braschi ("Down By Law"). It was a mistake, though, to transcend the meaning of the Holocaust by turning it into a farce.
The movie doesn't have the atmosphere or the sardonic pull of the similar Lina Wertmuller classic, "Seven Beauties," which accepted the reality of the war and had the superb comic actor Giancarlo Giannini at its center, saving his own life by sleeping with the commandant. Sure, we all make sacrifices, but sometimes we need to see what we're making them for.
For more movie reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at http://buffs.moviething.com/buffs/faust/
E-mail me with any questions, concerns or comments at jerry@movieluver.com or at Faust667@aol.com
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