Not as Good as Everyone Says

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2000)

The idea behind LA VITA E BELLA - "Life is Beautiful" - is a good one: when put into a Nazi deathcamp, a father tries to shield his son from the horrors of the reality by telling the boy it's all a game, a competition to play well and win the big prize at the end. But the delivery of the story fails only because Benigni also shields THE AUDIENCE from the horrors of the deathcamp. Perhaps Benigni thought our foreknowledge of the camps would play as a sufficiently horrific canvas on which Benigni can, then, paint his contrasting light story. But it doesn't work that way. Not for this viewer, anyway. The movie needed to play up the contrast of the evil element to allow the sweet story to shine more brightly than it did. While one is grateful that Benigni didn't show more graphic detail, one can't help imagine the movie's increased effectiveness if the scenes in the camp without the boy were more strongly constructed with suspenseful elements of threat, inhumanity, distress and hopelessness. This would have made the optimistic scenes with the boy all the more poignant.
Signore Benigni clearly has great vivacity and elan for life, as he has demonstrated at the Oscars ceremony (climbing over the chairs) and in other movies, which I'm sure makes him a great guy to know personally. But his personal joie de vivre seems to have undermined him from showing the full dark contrast needed here. I was more moved by Benigni's Oscar acceptance speech than by this movie for which he won.