Offensive

Rating: Null/10 (30 August 2003)

Let us put aside for a moment whether slapstick makes for a 'good' movie. Let us put aside the question of whether slapstick is appropriate for a movie about the Holocaust. Let us even put aside the question of whether you can have a movie about love and life and hope--even call the movie, with no sense of irony, 'Life is Beautiful'--when you're talking about one of the ugliest periods of human history.
The most basic problem with this atrocious movie is its dishonesty. Benigni and his apologists would claim that this is a fable, a work of fiction, that is not about the Holocaust. However, if the Holocaust is brought up, the movie is (at least in part) about the Holocaust, regardless of what a director may imagine. Moreover, even a work of fiction, which by definition need not be factual, must be true and honest. It cannot conflate the historical anomaly and at the same time diminish the historical majority. [These ideas are an adaptation of an article by Holocaust author Cynthia Ozick.]
Specifically, 'Life is Beautiful' is whitewashed of any Jewish influence, a fact probably stemming in large part from the movie's being based on the experiences of Benigni's own fascist father (who was arrested when Italy defected to the Allies late in the war). The names are not Jewish. There is nothing Jewish about the behavior or the experiences of the lives of the characters. And indeed...
SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING SPOILER ...the main survivors of the movie, Dora and Josue, are both Christian, whereas the only theoretically Jewish character, Guido, dies.
Also, just to mention briefly the obvious stuff, the concentration camp looks more like summer camp, the Nazis are portrayed (the little that they are at all) as buffoons, and there is no real sense of terribleness or atrocity. (If Benigni wants to make a powerful point about love, why does he have to diminish the horror of the camp to make it?) Even the dead bodies in the fog appear like something out of a Dali painting.