Finding Beauty in the Midst of Horror

Rating: 9/10 (5 July 2018)

Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful has reached rarefied heights in terms of critical acclaim. There are only a few times when a foreign-language film has been nominated for the Academy Award for best picture. It's been thirty years since a film was nominated for best picture and best foreign-language film. With its seven nominations (including actor, director, and screenplay) Life is Beautiful is one of the must-see films from last year's batch.
The first half of the film is about a man in pursuit of love. Guido develops a severe case of love at first sight when he bumps into "the princess" while traveling through the Italian countryside. Through humor and several carefully-arranged "chance encounters", Guido manages to win the heart, and eventually the hand, of the woman he loves. Benigni's comedic acting is reminiscent of Chaplin in City Lights. The first half of the film is filled with wonderful humor and charming romance.
The second half of the film jumps forward to the couple with their young son. Guido is trying to run a bookstore, but conditions are not conducive to success for Jewish businessmen in Italy during WWII. Guido and his son are taken to a concentration camp where Guido's primary concerns are being reunited with his wife and protecting his son from the brutality of life in the concentration camp. He does the latter by convincing his son that this is really all a game he arranged to celebrate the boy's birthday. If they follow the rules very carefully, they will make it to 1,000 points and win the grand prize.
Benigni's acting and story development are very Chaplinesque in the second half, but here we are reminded of Chaplin with The Kid or the clowning Chaplin in The Great Dictator. Like Chaplin, Benigni has a gift for comedy mixed with pathos. Some have criticized the film for its use of humor in conjunction with the holocaust, but the film is not about the holocaust, it's about the human spirit and what holocaust survivor Vicktor Frankl called the "will to meaning."
This film is a real gem. It will make you laugh, and it will make you cry, but most importantly perhaps, it will make you see how beautiful life really is, even in the darkest of circumstances.