What starts out to be a zany slapstick comedy turns out to be one of the years best. ***1/2 out of ****

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 1999)

"Life is Beautiful" starts out awful. It has no idea about what it wants to be, which is somewhere between a screwball comedy and an emotional tearjerker. There are more emotions being shuffled up in its script as there are minutes in the movie. The story is also very hard to follow. So how can a movie like this work?
The comedy part of this film details a hotel waiter in Italy in the 1930s, Guido, played by Benign, who also directed and co-wrote the movie. This man is a clown in some ways, and he creates most of the film's funny slapstick humor. A few examples of this include Guido arriving in town in a runaway car with failed brakes, his love at first sight with a woman named Dora, the many different directions one hat can lead to, and how he is mistaken for a school inspector giving a speech about his wonderful body.
After he and Dora eventually get married and have a son, who is five years old the first time we meet him, we learn that he is Jewish. In 1945, all of the Jews in the town are sent to a prison camp by the Fascists. Doha makes the decision come along to be with her family.
However, Guido makes up a story about a game that all of this is to his son to prevent him from learning the horror of the truth. The game is where everyone competes to be the fastest to earn 1000 points, then the prize is a real life tank.
It's at this point where the film takes off, and makes the audience feel sorry for the characters. And the story is as breathtaking as it is realistic. The film softens the holocaust to put in this humor, however. In real life I'm not sure that the couple would have lasted a week.
The performances were overlooked by me until the film's third act, where the father learns to keep his cool under all of this stress. Roberto Benigni is superb, as he is directing this movie. His comic touch seems out of place, but never do I have any complaints about it.
Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini, Gastonia Durano and Horst Buchholz, whom I have never heard of, all are at their very best, as the side characters. There are many, and sometimes they are a bit distracting. But in the end I am only praising the film for its choice of characters.
"Life is Beautiful" is visually stunning as well. The scenery and mountains are beautifully precious. I think this movie might be up for a nomination of best cinematography of the year. Without it, I think the audience may have been board between the characters talking and the humor layout.
This movie, in the end, does nothing less then remind us that life truly is beautiful, and we should never question imagination or our gut feeling about something. This is easily one of the best foreign language film's of the year. If it wasn't for the disastrous first half this movie may have made it to my "Top Ten of 1998" list. Still, we have a treasureous movie here that clearly works in what I call the "Think and Forget" method. Great job, Roberto Benigni.