A lie for the naive and ignorant.

Rating: 1/10 (8 June 1999)

Only the naive and ignorant will find this film charming. Those who know anything about the Holocaust will see it for what it is--a lie that desecrates the memory of six million dead.
Under the Nazis, six million Jews died for no other reason than that they were Jewish. This invests the fact of their Jewishness with transcendent importance. In "Life Is Beautiful," however, Roberto Benigni's character Guido is Jewish only because the film announces that he is. His Jewishness has no other significance; it is not the affirmation of anything; it is a manipulative plot device. Guido's goodness is not attributed to his being Jewish--that is something to be dispensed with quickly, as if it were an embarrassment.
And so Benigni ends up treating the Jews very little differently than the Nazis. For one thing, he shamefully misrepresents the reality of the Nazis' Konzentrationlagers. A Jew would have been murdered for any ONE of the acts of defiance that Guido gets away with. Benigni's film turns the real danger and real violence and real death of the Holocaust into something like a Roadrunner cartoon in which Wile E. Coyote never really suffers or dies. But this is a lie: under the Nazis, the Jews suffered and died. They did not get away with carefree acts of defiance.
What is more, the mass of Jews in the camp in which Guido and his son are imprisoned are treated as nothing more than the faceless and nameless background to Benigni's disgusting clowning. They are given no more individuation--no more personhood and uniqueness--than they were by the Nazis themselves.
"Life Is Beautiful" is an obscene exploitation of enormity and sorrow.