so astonishingly misbegotten it took my breath away

Rating: Null/10 (8 April 1999)

I saw this movie although I had a strong sense beforehand that it was drastically misguided, after seeing it, I realized that it was far worse than I could have imagined. Roberto Benigni in his benighted way, probably thinks what he did here was heroic, I can excuse poor judgement and taste in an artist, but for the life of me, I cannot fathom how anything so misbegotten could be so popular and somewhat critically acclaimed. Certainly, there are true stories of incredible bravery, fortitude and even humor in the face of such unrelenting evil, but these are true stories (like the escape from Sobibor). Benigni, however, creates, out of whole cloth, as far as I can tell, a fairy tale which uses the Holocaust as background. He creates a character and situations that could simply not exist under such conditions and are not even remotely related to anyone or anything in the history of the holocaust. To further compound the problem, he constructs Aushwitz-lite in which the latter half of the movie takes place. A place with gas chambers, unrelenting, (but Chaplin-esque) hard labor, and with such seemingly lax security that Benigni's character can commandeer the camp's PA system, and effectively hide his son. Further, the inmates, who in reality, were starved and worked to death never appeared more than "bushed." These fictional liberties, to my mind, are unforgiveable. The Holocaust is always foreground, and there is no "lite" available. The germans simply killed you, unrelentingly, for any reason whatsoever. Further, one of the worst aspects of arrival at a death camp like Aushwitz was the sudden separation (culling) of the children from the parents, husbands from wives. This activity, never overlooked, immediately told the prisoners they had passed from the land of the living into hell. Somehow this little fact was passed over by Benigni. He simply keeps his son with him. Indeed, none of the playful little camp activities portrayed could have ever existed for even a milli-second. Benigni's story could have taken place in any particular bad situation, why set it in a concentration camp. Perhaps my reaction seems humorless, but really, the humor here is strained and out of place. What was he thinking? Evil triumphed, millions were dispatched in the most monstrous of conditions. Nothing can modify this, the pure fact of its occurrence makes interpretation, let alone heart warming entertainment an impossibility.