The Light-Hearted Holocaust Comedy The World Needed

Rating: 10/10 (17 February 2010)

Life Is Beautiful is Roberto Benigni's simple and unpretentious comic masterpiece about the Holocaust. It's also one of the most wonderfully manipulative movies ever made, one that lulls the viewer into a sense of security and joy before introducing him to a terrifying story about altruism and the price of love.
The movie contains in fact two stories: one follows the lovable Guido falling in love with Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), a schoolteacher, and using his humour and imagination to win her heart. The first thirty minutes of the movie are a lovely homage to classic cinema, in the way it sets up countless gags that are later pulled off with whimsical and hilarious results, and with perfect timing. There's a lot of physical humor in the movie that reminds one of the old silent comedies.
After the viewer has fallen in love with Guidio and become intoxicated with Guido's love for Dora, the movie turns a darker turn and details how Guido and his young son are sent to a concentration camp. For Guido is a Jewish, as the movie stated from the start. It seems an insignificant detail at first but it changes Guido's life forever.
In the camp Guido, using his endless imagination, convinces his son that they were sent to a fun camp where they have to earn points working and performing special tasks to win a tank in the end. Guido loves his son so much he wants to spare him the truth about the world's horrors.
This movie has been much criticised for trivialising the Holocaust, I claim I couldn't care less about. Art is not beholden to matters of good taste. In fact, as Rabelais, the father of the modern novel, has shown us, art is full of vulgarity, blasphemy and humour. Why should cinema be any different? This movie is pure invention, a ridiculously simple version of the relationships between prisoners and between prisoners and guards. But in its fiction it's closer to novels, which always start from invention too, and by being invention it manages to speak about themes that transcend a mere account of Holocaust reality. What this movie has to say about father/son love, the price of altruism, and the power of imagination is the stuff of high art.
Roberto Benigni is excellent in all the roles he had in this movie: as an actor (he much deserved his Oscar), as a director, and especially as a screenwriter, whose ability to invent gags and comic situations was remarkable. He only didn't provide the music; that was accomplished by Nicola Piovani, who also deserved his Oscar. Like all manipulative filmmakers, music is 90% the manipulation, and Piovani provides all the upbeat and dreamy and melancholy themes that make Life is Beautiful a heartbreaking experience.