Most overrated film I've seen in years

Rating: Null/10 (9 May 2004)

SPOILERS I am not a cynic in the Pauline Kael mode. My main problem with Life Is Beautiful is that for this type of film to work, it must first be believable. For example, even if Anne Frank and her family had avoided capture, her story would have been believable because of the extreme measures that they took to protect themselves. So, too, are the heroics shown in Schindler's List.
From everything that I know about the Holocaust, Life is Beautiful is anything but believable. It is so full of holes that I cannot omprehend why it was so well received. To be specific (spoiler warning):
* The story begins in 1939. Guido's child, Joshua, would have been born in 1940. He is five years old when the family is taken way by the Germans, making it 1945. By that time, the Allies had liberated Italy and the Germans were long gone.
* When they reached the concentration camp, Joshua would have been immediately separated from his father. He would never have made it to the father's barracks.
* In "interpreting" the rules for the German soldier--and making a joke out of them, Guido makes his son laugh. The child would have been taken away immediately and Guido probably would have been shot on the spot.
* Guido would never have been able to hide his son in the barracks. We are expected to believe that the Germans never inspected them. Give me a break! To make matters worse, whenever someone comes to the door, the child is in plain view. He doesn't hide under the blanket until after the person enters.
* Guido attempts to shield his son from reality by making a game out of their imprisonment. There are about 50 men in the barracks. Are we to believe that all of them participated in the ruse? Surely some of them would have talked about the horrors that they had seen or heard about.
* The scene where Joshua eats dinner with the German children is preposterous. Are we to believe that the Germans, with their fixation on racial purity, could not tell a dirty Italian Jewish child from their own clean-scrubbed Aryan broods?
* The where Guido is captured and prances in front of his son's hiding place like Robert Preston in The Music Man rings totally false. First of all, it would have called attention to the fact that something was going on, and therefore, would have put Joshua at risk. Secondly, anyone acting that nuts in a concentration camp would have been shot on the spot.
* I even find the final scene, where Joshua rides away in the tank, hard to take. Here is a small boy who has been kept in hiding for who knows how long. His only food has been whatever his father could sneak into him. The child would have been starved and half-dead. He could never have climbed onto the tank.
* Finally, wouldn't the child have been more concerned about finding his father than riding in the tank? Surely he must have heard the gunshots when his father was killed. Yet even when he finds his mother, he expresses no concern about Guido.
In my opinion, Life Is Beautiful trivializes the Holocaust, much as Hogan's Heroes trivialized the horrors of the POW camps. There are some horrors in life that cannot be made funny without insulting the memory of the human beings who suffered them. The Holocaust is one such horror.