Almost beautiful

Rating: 8/10 (23 May 2004)

Roberto Benigni, the Italian Chaplin, has made, in 'Life is Beautiful', a comedy about the holocaust. Which first begs the question: is it acceptable to do such a thing? To which the answer must be "yes". Often the best (and most unsettling) comedy is the blackest, in which the intertwining of the funny and the tragic makes us consider afresh the absurdity of life and death. And the holocaust, sadly, was horrific precisely because by the fact that it happened it proved that such events do fall within the range of human behaviour. If, in remembering the holocaust, we can only do so with solemnity, we put it in a mausoleum outside of the rest of human experience; and are thereby less, not more, likely to understand and remember.
But this leads onto a second question: is it possible to make a comedy about the holocaust (or at any rate a good one)? Here the sheer scale of the awfulness makes a positive answer harder to give: for such a film to work, the comedy must be commensurate with the tragedy; and this perhaps cannot be done. An earlier (and brilliant) film of Benigni's, 'Johnny Stecchino', poked fun at gangsters: but even then, it was working with stereotyped gangsters as depicted in movies, not at real murderers extinguishing human life. With the holocaust, there is no such get outs: few have even dared make straight movies about this subject.
The first half of 'Life is Beautiful' is a classic Benigni romp, poking some gentle fun at the less extreme excesses of Italian fascism as it proceeds. It's silly but good, a story of inescapable charm. But in the second half, the scene moves to somewhere like Auschwicz, and the film becomes more problematic. The idea (of a man who uses humour to save his son, and himself, from confronting the true horror of his situation) has some merit but is ultimately not sustainable in the face of reality. So the film has to tone down reality. Benigni is treated rather better than the average Auschwicz inmate (the film nowhere implies just how low the survival rate was); his fellow prisoners are shown as faceless zombies (distancing us when they do get killed); while when the subject of mass murder is directly addressed, the film inevitably slumps into mawkishness. There are still some good gags, and occasionally some telling moments (particularly those involving a "humane" doctor who Beningi befriends); but overall the setting rings false. The film might have achieved more poignancy and realism had it been set in a pre-deportation Jewish ghetto: by going all the way to the death camps, it overplays its hand.
'Life is Beautiful' is still a funny and original film; but actually less brave than you might at first think.