Truly Beautiful

Rating: 9/10 (8 June 2016)

I may like this movie more than I should, as right after I finished watching it, I received my very first partial request from an agent. Even now, as I'm writing this, I'm ecstatic. But even putting all that aside, this is still a fantastic movie.
This is the first good Holocaust movie I've seen that both 1) isn't so depressing I feel drained for the rest of the day and 2) is still reverent and respectful and dramatic. It is hard to make a character-driven Holocaust movie, mostly because the enormity of the event takes away from the characters. Spielberg was able to do it with Schindler's List. Benigni does it in a totally different way with Life is Beautiful.
The main plot of the movie is centered around a funny Italian Jew waiter who was put into a concentration camp with his son during World War II. His son is only four or five, so he makes up stories about how they are playing a game and how when they get to 1000 points, they'll get a tank. It's cute, it's funny, it's depressing, and it just works. If they had played it hollowly or cynically, it wouldn't have been successful. But they didn't. Benigni- who picks up a well-deserved Oscar for his role, becoming the only person to ever win Best Actor at the Oscars for a performance given in a foreign language- tells his son these things as if they were the absolute and total truth, giving himself to them, wanting to believe them himself. It's a sight to behold.
Naturally, there were critics who attacked this movie for not being another grim, miserable, slog of a Holocaust movie. They just have in their minds that movies are supposed to be one way, and if they're not that way, they must be bad. I hate these kind of people. They don't have a right to live, let alone be critics. Honestly, I think it's a bit pompous for an American critic (who is part of a country that was an ocean away from the Holocaust) or even a British critic (who is part of a country that managed to avoid having their citizens butchered in it, though they lost many people in the war effort) to attack the portrayal of the Holocaust from a country whose Jews experienced in quite personally.
Either way, it's a completely shallow thought. This movie gets how horrible the Holocaust was. In fact, it gets it a lot more than many other movies set here do. It gets it in a personal, somber, humanistic desperate sense, a sense in which you have to do whatever it takes to stay alive and not wait to die and get your spirit pounded out of you. I can understand why Americans and Brits might not get it, though that's no excuse for the amount of ignorance in the reviews, but it makes perfect sense.
The first act of the film- which takes place before the Holocaust- is actually the best in the film. I could watch that and nothing else and be satisfied. Part of me wishes that been stretched out to two hours and made the entire movie. It would have been the funniest, most heartfelt romcom of the 90's. The relationship between our main leads (Guido and Dora) is phenomenal... which is of course why Dora is shrugged off to the side when the Holocaust portion starts in favor of Guido and their son, Joshua. Yes, I know it makes sense from a logistical standpoint, and it's a great story on its own right, but it is jarring.
While I love this movie, it does have some pacing problems. The first act seems disconnected from the rest. The transition isn't completely out of the left field, as plot points from the first act are developed in the second and third, but it seems almost like an entirely different team made the first act, or like this is the result of two scripts being mashed together. It's not terrible, but it is sort of distracting. I think a rewrite or two could have been a boon.
Anyway, this is still one of the best movies of the nineties, and it broke down a lot of barriers for foreign films. It certainly helped that this is prime Oscar bait (WWII, sacrifice, mildly happy ending, love and loss), but it never once felt like Oscar bait to me. Benigni made this movie solely because it's the movie he wanted to make, and I'm glad it was such a runaway success. It's a brilliant film, and one people will watch over and over again long after dredge like The Pianist has been forgotten.