Joy beats desperation.

Rating: 8/10 (11 September 1999)

Life Is Beautiful changes people and their attitudes. Not towards History or Politics, like other Holocaust movies do (or at least attempt to), but towards life. What deeply moved me was the way Guido (Benigni) treats his son in the movie. He does not try to inject him unnecessary maturity, he teaches him how to deal with life in his own way: from a funny point of view, led by apparently infinite zest for life and not taking anything seriously.
The father makes his son believe that they are participants of a collective game instead of prisoners in a concentration camp, and in his funny, creative and never ever desperate nature, he is always able to convince the boy.
To me the ending was not sad at all. I realized it as a very positive one.
And I think that is exactly what Benigni (although I have to say I can´t really laugh about Slapstick in general; be it Chaplin or Benigni) intended to tell us: Only when we remain young at our hearts, in acceptance of life, seeing not everything too seriously, maybe even seeing it as a game, as the young boy does, then only we are able, after such a gruesome experience like an imprisonment in a concentration camp, to rise our fists up in the air, to cry full of joy: `We have won!' Only with a philosophy of life like Guido shows us, we are finally able to admit to ourselves that Life Is Beautiful.