Two movies for the price of one - the first is a delight, the second a travesty

Rating: Null/10 (6 February 2000)

Life Is Beautiful is really two separate movies - completely different in plot, tone and intent. The first part is a breezy romantic comedy, one which is exceedingly well-done: clever, goofy, big-hearted and a lot of fun. It resurrects the style of the old silent classics like Chaplin and Keaton and adapts it for modern day audiences. And Roberto Benigni is a first rate clown - a hangdog mixture of Woody Allen and Kramer from "Seinfeld". If you were to turn off this movie after the first hour, you would have gotten your money's worth.
However, if you stick around for the second part you'll likely want your money back - as well as a full public apology from Benigni for being such a moral retard. For, once he and his son are rounded up by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, the movie turns into one of the biggest travesties in the history of cinema. Just who was the idiot who allowed Benigni to introduce something as weighty as the Holocaust into this whimsical and paper-thin world? Inflicting Bugs Bunny or Charlie Brown with AIDS would make about as much sense.
Now, I've heard this film defended as being a "fable" - as if to say, "Well, straight forward realism isn't what Benigni was going for." Well I'm sorry, but if straight forward realism isn't what you're going for, then you DON'T use the Holocaust as your backdrop; it is too real and horrific an event to yield its place to fables and fairy tales. Once you're a stone's throw away from the ovens, the logic of a cartoon world just does not hold up. And, sadly, it is only by such cartoon logic that we can conceive of Benigni keeping his son so well insulated from the horrors going on all around him. Implausibilities just pile up here like so many dead Jews (you find that phrasing offensive? Welcome to the world of Life Is Beautiful): the opening sequence with the guard, where Benigni pretends to "translate" his German - wouldn't any of the other inmates have commented upon how illogical his spiel was, and thereby alert the guard that he wasn't being translated properly (and, further, didn't this whole scene play like an egregious "Hogan's Heroes" rerun? Just what we need, a sitcom set in a concentration camp); and is it logical to assume that the kid would stay so well-hidden in his barracks all day, or that no guard would ever search the top bunks to find him?; how about the supremely idiotic moment when Guido (Benigni's character name) gets on the camp loudspeaker to say hello to his wife? Under normal circumstances, the schmaltz of this scene would merely be laughable, but the context of the Holocaust makes it instead deeply offensive. To which Benigni adds stupidity in the next moment by allowing the kid to get on as well: isn't the whole point to *hide* the kid, so that the guards don't realize he's still alive? Of course, Benigni knows he doesn't have to worry about them finding his son - after all, since he wrote the script, those guards will only do what he tells them to do, logic and history be damned.
For that is exactly what Benigni is doing here: he's damning history, showing a cavalier disregard for facts. "Yes," I can imagine him saying, "I know six million were murdered, but I don't like that ending. I'll write my own upbeat version of the truth." Of course, that's precisely what Guido does with his son: he creates his own version of the truth, lying in order to shield the boy from the true horror of their situation. Ok, forget for a moment the plausibility of keeping up such a charade and instead ask yourself this: Is that such a good idea? I mean, after all, if the kid truly doesn't know the danger he's in, how can he protect himself? This is the same kind of logic that grownups use so frequently to lie to their young kids about death or divorce, or any other similarly weighty topics - almost always to the detriment of the child later in life. So not only is Guido's deceiving of his son not noble or "touching" - it's actually downright dangerous. Furthermore, even on a purely symbolic level, the notion that innocence could somehow be preserved amidst the horror of the Holocaust is an outright lie, and a truly insidious one. Anyone who's read Elie Wiesel's "Night," where he describes his childhood years inside a camp and the bitter toll they took upon his faith and his sense of justice in the world, would understand the true depth of this lie.
To sum up, I have to be a little nasty. Normally, I'm a strong believer in "to each his own," particularly when it comes to movies. If you like something and I don't, or vice versa, we can argue about it, but ultimately we're each entitled to our opinions. Not here. The subject portrayed is so monumental, and its treatment so facile, that if you like this movie I have to say that there is something seriously wrong with you. Either you're a moral retard like Benigni, or you know nothing about the Holocaust, or you are far too easily manipulated into crying on cue and getting all warm and emotional inside that you lose sight of the depths to which the filmmakers are sinking. I don't know how this movie got such nearly unanimous across-the board support, whereas only a few short years ago Schindler's List opened a large debate concerning the ability of films to accurately portray the Holocaust. Could it be that this film's refusal of an accurate portrayal - in favor of its "fable" approach - is what makes it so palatable? Are we ready now to sugarcoat the Holocaust, make it less of a "downer"? Scary thought. Perhaps it's time for Mel Brooks to dust off his "Springtime for Hitler" musical which seemed so patently absurd thirty years ago; sadly, I could just see it now being the toast of Broadway.

First part of film: Three stars out of Five
Second part : Zero stars