Life draws its energy from Italy's answer to Robin Williams, the brilliant, sometimes excessive clown, Roberto Benigni. Here, though, the stakes are higher than in medical school. The greater part of Life Is Beautiful takes place in a Nazi death camp. What follows is mainly a string of vignettes detailing Benigni's battle to maintain this delusion against ever-harder circumstances. In the hands of a lesser artist, the result would be unconvincing at best, self-caricature at worst.
Life is powerful precisely because it keeps the limits of fantasy clearly in view.
The movie has been criticized, predictably, for obscuring the horror of the Holocaust by concentrating on a small, heroic effort in which one person is saved. This, though, is unfair. Benigni does not win over his guards or attract converts among his fellow prisoners, who regard him with the indifference that the condemned reserve for madmen. Fantasy and clowning are not the first recourse, but the last. They belong to the powerless.