Wake up, people!

Rating: 1/10 (30 January 2000)

A nasty little bit of Holocaust revisionism, one wonders whether anyone who liked this film actually thought about it. Sure, Benigni is winsomely charming, but what is he trying to say here? That the concentration camps were not so bad, or at least survivable if one kept one's head or tried a little humor? The film trivializes the deaths of 6 million, while letting everyone else breath a little easier for not having to face, even at the big screen's remove, the completely dehumanizing horror that was Hitler's death machine. If you think "Life is Beautiful" is sweet or uplifting, I invite you to watch "The Last Days," the Spielberg-produced documentary of Holocaust survivors, or even to see "Schindler's List" again. There was nothing sweet about it.