I was amazed--and appalled

Rating: Null/10 (9 April 1999)

Never have I left a movie theater as disappointed and disgusted as I was with "Life is Beautiful." Benigni's film is only mildly funny at its best and terribly offensive at its worst.
Numerous reviews have compared Benigni to Chaplin, a grave disservice to Chaplin's memory. Benigni's pratfalls can be seen coming a mile away; at one point he even falls over a chair while carrying a loaded tray of food. How original!
Worse, Benigni never, never stops talking. His rapid-fire delivery is funny for about 10 minutes, then it's simply annoying.
After about an hour of this somewhat amusing comedy, Benigni and his family get carted off to a concentration camp and the film becomes an exercise in amazingly bad taste. Gee, that place is remarkably clean and safe for a concentration camp. Benigni doesn't have to worry about being shot when he casually walks out the door at one point, these German soldiers are so stupid that a little boy can evade them just by hiding on the top of a bunk bed and ducking anytime someone comes in.
Benigni complains constantly when forced to do hard labor-- oh, those Nazis were so mean, weren't they, making him carry all those anvils? But look how they took that Jewish guy off to the infirmary and stitched up his arm when he got hurt. I guess all those stories about how troublesome Jews were dragged to one side and shot weren't true.
In short, Benigni presents a camp with almost no horror, or horror extremely white-washed. We never see him deal with the fact that his father was gassed, along with many others he probably knew. He gets on the PA system to send a message to his wife at one point, a blatantly manipulative scene that is clearly meant to get the audience teary. Would anyone do that in real life, risking both his own life and that of his son? Ditto for the playing classical music so his wife can hear it nonsense.
And the end, oh the end--I nearly screamed in anger and frustration--you can practically hear Benigni saying, "now, that wasn't so bad, was it?" as the inmates walk away from the camp. A concentration camp's a breeze if you just grin and never stop talking.