Beautiful Indeed

Rating: Null/10 (16 April 2013)

Life is Beautiful begins with a nonchalant nod towards its whimsicality, issued by an unknown narrator that the uneasy story about to unfold is anything but acquiescent and virtually an engrossing tragedy.
What follows next is a bright and colorful landscape of two Italian-Jewish friends gallivanting through the countryside. It looks like the setting of the fable Pinocchio. It isn't before long that the "once upon a time" setting terminates and relocates into a serious tone. In this juxtaposition, the film triumphs.
Guido (played by Roberto Benigni) is an incorrigible optimist, both facetious and clumsy. But he's honest, friendly, and (at times) oblivious to perhaps just how whimsical he is. But he has no complaints and shrugs off bad karma. When it's dark, he'll light a candle. If his bike has a flat, he'll skip to work. If it rains, he dances (point taken). Guido's characterization, gradually built up in the first half of the movie, is pivotal for later illustrating the relationship with his innocent son, Joshua. He's never a man to accept defeat and insists on marrying the beautiful senioria Dora after multiple fortuitous encounters. Their chemistry is affable and the kinetic synergy between the two in the fairy tale frame is hypnotizing. I can't help but admire the film's foreshadow abruptly after the two elope, where Guido steals her away on a horse literally marked for death. But recall, he's not one to let a rainy day ruin his parade.
Reality occurs several years later, where Guido, Dora, and his only son Joshua are sequestered into a Jewish Ghetto (a hostile concentration camp riddled with Nazis), and Guido is burdened with the task of explaining to his child that the visceral reality is actually just a fun, elaborate game organized by "bad guys". In some ways one might identify these scenes as a cathartic justice for all of the mishaps Guido caused earlier in act one; alas, Guido continues to make the best of his situation, even in one so extreme as the infamous Holocaust.
I began to wonder over halfway through the film if Guido's motives were to ward off reality from his son, or, more poignantly, himself. For Guido was always a character living in a superfluous fantasy. Consider then that the Holocaust is the ultimate test of an optimist's character, and one that is innately passed from father to son.
Life is Beautiful is also one of the finest Holocaust films I've seen (among Schindler's List, The Pianist, and Sophie's Choice to name a view). While it is far from the most visually graphic, it is nevertheless ominous and intimidating in its depiction of mass genocide. It's appealing that the ethnocentrism here wasn't preached like in Sophie's Choice, or that the Nazis were Satan's disciples like in Schindler's List, or even that the film was so god damn bleak from start to finish (*cough, the Pianist).
What we're given here is an entirely different take on such a grim subject matter. The perspective is accentuated from the transition into fairy-tale to reality. The reality hardens when it's exploited by an optimist in a pessimistic scenario. The payoff, in the finale, is a bitter triumph. Life is beautiful. Never before had I ever thought twice about that sentiment. From now on, I will.