Great Movie Despite Some Historical Inaccuracies

Rating: 9/10 (6 February 2018)

Life is Beautiful is one of those movies that makes you laugh, makes you cry and makes you feel almost every emotion in between. If the movie's goal was to tug at your heartstrings and make you feel a kind of personal loss, then it did a fantastic job. After watching this film, I felt personally connected to Guido and Dora's love story, their family and their lives, which made it immensely harder to watch them suffer in the concentration camp. If the film's objective was to portray historically accurate content, then it did a less than fantastic job. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved the film, but as a history student who has studied concentration camps in detail I could not help but notice some historical discrepancies that could be a little distracting to the history buff. First off, the publication of the "Manifest of Racial Scientists" appeared in 1938, kicking off the official anti-Semitic movement in Italy. These new anti-Jewish policies were created in the likeness of the Nazi Nuremburg laws, so a Jew to Non-Jew marriage would have never legally occurred at this time in history, as was the marriage between Guido and Dora. In terms of the concentration camp itself, a child of Giosué's age would have rarely, if ever, made it past the "selection" points upon entering the camp. It was common for camp doctors to select the elderly and children for immediate gassing directly off of the train, since they would not be able to complete much work. That fact that Giosué was not selected, especially in a work camp, is an historical oversight. It is also historically incorrect to see concentration camp inmates with tattooed numbers outside of Auschwitz, since the notorious extermination camp was the only known place to tattoo inmates. Lastly, in this film, the heads of the women in the camp were not shaved upon arrival. This was commonly done in all concentration camps to stop the spread of lice. In terms of historical accuracies, the chaos that ensued in all concentration camps as the Allied forces advanced and the war was nearing an end is given more historical attention than most other parts of this film. The burning of books and the fast escape of the camp soldiers well represents the disorder and madness that would have surrounded the soldiers covering their tracks. Overall, I really enjoyed this movie as a cinematic experience and one that feels more emotionally jarring than a documentary that just displays numerical statistics. While some parts of the film may not be the most historically accurate, the feelings of sadness and loss that one feels after watching this film are real and effective and that makes it worth the watch.