It's completely authentic, never faky. The beginning half of the movie basicly just sets up the second half. But that's a good thing, because it shows the lives of the characters and gets the audience involved. Not only that, but the first half would be great as a movie by itself - a comedy. Yet it nicely fits with the second half.
Life Is Beautiful is amazing.
Many of the scenes are shot so perfectly and so artfully. The acting is very good, although sometimes with subtitled foreign films, dialogue is nearly impossible to analyze. The acting is still wonderfully done. A scene that comes as a shock to us English-speakers is in the last five minutes of the movie, when we hear, for the first time, English. It is spoken by an American soldier, kind of a cross between Andy Griffith and Elvis - perhaps Italy's interpretation of Americans.