Great start, horrible end

Rating: 6/10 (12 April 1999)

This film 1st half is a wonderful use of whimsy. The love story is enchanting. Though the dialogue for the first 10 minutes is a little fast and hard to keep up with the subtitles.
Then it moves to the concentration camp and the whimsy does not work. Benigni completely romanticizes it. No one is dirty or overly thin. And a blurry shot of a pile of bones does not make up for this.
This also pushes this modern attitude that we should lie to our children and tell them everything that happens and they do is great. This is wrong.
And Benigni definitely shouldn't have won best actor. But it is high irony that Tom Hanks finally gave a complex and human portrait of a man and lost to a sentimental performance like he won both of his for.