Enjoyable, but room for improvement

Rating: 7/10 (5 February 2018)

The film La Vita è Bella probes an interesting question: should tragic events should always be presented in media as dramas. While there is validity to the belief that producing films about horrific events such as the Holocaust as comedies is insensitive, the film is successful in making the victims of the atrocities appear human. Through the use of comedy, the viewer feels emotionally connected to Guido Orefice and his son. The film is also successful in showing that life did not purely end when one was admitted into a concentration camp. Throughout their period of encampment, many prisoners engaged in discussion with one another about intellectual topics and strong emotional bonds were often forged within the camps. Many films about the holocaust fail to capture that the people within the camps would often develop "camp cultures" to combat their suffering. While the film is incredible inaccurate as it would have been impossible for a child as young as Guido's son, Giosuè, to survive within a concentration camp, La Vita è Bella is able to show that not every experience within the camp was inherently tragic and that every experience, even the most horrific experiences, are multifaceted.
The film, however, fails to truly illustrate the pandemonium that developes when a concentration camp closes. In contrast to the film, most concentration camps such as Dachau witnessed a sharp increase in the amount of prisoners prior to their capture by the Allied powers. While the film did depict the overall chaos which emerged when the camp was about to shut down, it would have been more realistic to have the camp population appear to grow as the film progressed. The population increase, however, could make it appear as if people were not dying at the camp and would have most likely undercut the majority of the humor in the final scenes of the film. Additionally, the film failed to portray what happened to the concentration camp victims once they were released. Many internees struggled to find basic necessities such as food or shelter following release, and many survivors had a hard time adjusting to life outside of the camp. Instead, the film end on the relatively uplifting note of the mother son reunion. The quality of the film, from both a historical and emotional perspective, would have been improved if the ending had been less positively by showing the adversity the mother and son following release.