Mediocre film that doesn't understand what it wants to be

Rating: 4/10 (22 April 2018)

It shouldn't be surprising that this movie isn't a very great one, as it is very hard to take a matter like the holocaust and try to create a parody of it as Benigni tries to do here. Yet it has been done before succesfully, but unfortunately Life is Beautiful is not one of these instances.
It seems to be a movie with the central message that you can find hope in anything or anyone, yet it comes off as a sitcom with jokes you just can't seem to laugh about. Benigni himself was overacting like a madman the entire film, yet comically, dramatically and emotionally he does not seem to make any dent whatsoever. The story is also rushed. He suddenly has a child and expects that this is his free ticket in order to feel sympathy for his character, yet it comes across as a cheap way to get the audiences undeserved sympathies. Benigni uses cliché'd jokes that we have all seen before, rendering it inaffective as a comedy film. The movie doesn't take itself seriously enough in its seemingly serious setting of the holocaust, making it also fail as a dramatic or emotional film. Ofcourse Dr Strangelove by Kubrick is an example of where it actually works to create a comic effect over a serious matter, but this is generally because the comic aspect is a lot funnier, the dramatic aspect is a lot more plausible, Peter Sellers is simply a better actor than Benigni, and the film knows at all times it does not take itself seriously, unlike this one.
The cinematography is alright, but nothing special. There are a couple of nice landscape shots and the scene where the train arrives are quite nicely filmed, but it is nothing to cry home about. The music is decent, but not enough to make you emotionally involved in the picture like Ennio Morricone's score for fellow italian film Cinema Paradiso (1988) managed to do so well. There are also a lot of scenes in the latter part of the film where particular scenes could have easily been drawn out to create a more dramatic effect, yet Benigni cuts everything short and everything seems to end way too abruptly and quickly, negating any kind of emotional connection you might be starting to feel. I would say despite the fact that Benigni was even worse in the first half of the film, i would still prefer the first over the second, as atleast it seemed to know which direction it was going at that point, but in the second it turned into an unfocused mess of sillyness to the point where we cannot absorb any kind of dramatic or emotional impact we were supposed to get.
If you ignore all these obvious issues, which i am certain a lot of people did, some might consider it a movie with a message, yet you are indifferent to any possible message since the characters seem indifferent to the situation.