Slight and forgettable.

Rating: 2/10 (6 April 1999)

Life is Beautiful made no noticeable impression on me. There were some well-rendered moments, but on the whole I found it to be a shabby movie. It's a hell of a lot better than most movies that get made, but that isn't really saying much.
Begnini certainly has some kind of endearing quality about him, but it's not enough to carry a movie, especially one so slightly composed and predictably directed. Indeed, that was the glossiest concentration camp I've ever seen onscreen, but aside from all of that, the part that seems to have most of an effect on the people I've talked to about this flick -- the story and characters -- were not enough of a presence to make any kind of stamp on my mind. This movie relies entirely too much on the work of other movies and on the memory of its audience. If you don't have the camp from Schindler's List or a lifetime of history lessons in mind while watching this flick, you'd have no idea what Roberto is hiding from the boy. There is that pile of bodies and that offscreen shooting, but they inspire nothing. They have no visceral power. That shot of the piled bodies only gets something across because it's expected in a Holocaust movie, not because it is a powerful image. You know what it is because Amon Goeth set fire to such a thing in Schindler's List. Taken by itself, the movie doesn't stand up insofar as it doesn't directly relate its characters to any real atrocity. It relies too heavily on the predjudices of the audience to carry its message across. I tried watching it from the perspective of a child, and I suppose it would have been a little better from a child's POV, but the thing is, a child doesn't have the knowledge of what Begnini is going out of his way not to show. It's a harmless movie that defangs its subject matter while standing up for something that is easy to stand up for. Thinking about this movie afterwards, I went from merely annoyed to just plain mad. What annoyed me about it was how the subsidiary characters were such cardboard mock-ups of human beings. The German doctor who really only cares about solving riddles, the brother that phones his lines in and then disappears, the good wife who shows up at the camp so Roberto can play that record for her, the other prisoners, and all the others that escape me at the moment, are merely foils for Roberto's pranks or the movie's message. This movie is accoladed in the way it is because it says that the Holocaust is bad. And these accolades come despite the shabbiness of its construction. Schindler's List says essentially the same thing, but that movie achieves greatness because of the sheer power of its imagery, the indelible humanity of its characters (on both sides), and the personal conviction behind it. Begnini remade an old Jerry Lewis movie. I went in looking for a great movie because I was told by many people that it was great, but that is not what I saw.