The guy laughed uproariously at things that were only mildly funny. I sat there for two hours and thought about how glorious it would be if I ripped the armrest from my chair and buried it in this guy's skull. Then I would turn the girlfriend upside-down, plunge her head into the other end of the armrest, and carry them out of the theater like human dumbbells to the scattered applause of the theater's remaining eight attendees. Then, life would be beautiful. Everything is perspective.
Life is beautiful.
Life is pain. Benigni chooses the Holocaust to demonstrate the former in the context of the latter through some very selective perspective. Life is beautiful because Guido shields his son from all the bad things around him with humor, and his son survives and presumably learns to love life. Sure, it's a neat trick to set such an uplifting story in the shadow of the gas chambers, but there are better ways to celebrate life than blithely glossing over its darkest moments. If life was beautiful during the Holocaust, then my moronic audience-mates were Nobel laureates, Roberto Benigni is a good filmmaker, and you can just start calling me Mr. Happy.