Comic movies about the Nazis, whether by Lubitsch or Chaplin, have always left me with a bad aftertaste. A comic movie about the Holocaust strikes me as unthinkable. Yet Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, hailed on all sides, awarded or nominated for numerous prizes, and a sure candidate for one or more Oscars, is just that, or almost. Two middle-aged women who recognized me and queried me about it on the bus simply could not get it through their heads that I was calling the film not excellent but execrable.
Benigni, a well-known comedian who co-wrote, directed, and stars in the film, stops just short of outright Holocaust comedy. The first, prewar part is a silly farce, not nearly so funny as forced. The second part, in a death camp, is sentimental comedy-drama, totally unbelievable and downright stupid. It intends to be sweet, wistful, and touching, and to excuse itself with not wishing to be taken literally. I say it cannot be taken, period, unless you enjoy grossing out on imbecile lies.
Guido, the hero, is a waiter in Arezzo (the views of which, as shot by the veteran Tonino delli Colli, are the film's one asset), who comically meets the heroine, Dora, not once but some half-dozen times. He woos her with sundry pratfalls and by calling her Princess, and for the rest, chance takes over -- and over and over.
For example, Guido notices that under a certain window when a man shouts "Maria!" a key is dropped for him, which, needless to say, beans Guido. On a rainy night, when he has snatched Dora away from her hated fiancé, who is also Guido's nemesis (Guido keeps snatching the fellow's expensive hats and substituting his own, for which the guy chases after him), they seek shelter under that window. Dora says she hasn't got her latchkey, whereupon Guido boasts that the Virgin Mary answers his prayers. "Maria!" he shouts, and, pronto, down flies the key. That it wouldn't fit Dora's lock isn't gone into.
When they get to Dora's gate, she remarks that Guido's hat has gotten all wet, and she decides to address the Virgin herself. She asks for a dry hat, and who should pop up but her deserted fiancé and Guido's nemesis to angrily swap hats. Another miracle -- no wonder Dora ends up marrying Guido.
We skip to the last year of World War II. The spouses Guido and Dora run a bookshop on which is painted in huge letters "jewish store." But otherwise they live in perfect bliss and a cozy house with their bright and adorable 6-or-7-year-old Giosuè. The Germans come and pick up Guido, his uncle, and Giosuè, and lead them onto a death-camp train. Dora, though unsummoned, insists on boarding another car full of women. Here sentimental comedy takes over. Guido tells Giosuè, who mourns a toy tank he left behind, that this is all a game, a giant contest with very rough play, but with a real giant tank for first prize. And he manages to persuade the boy that everything from being brutishly prodded into cattle cars to all the subsequent hardships and horrors of the camp is just a huge competition, to be won by whoever is first to amass 1,000 points for endurance. Hard to tell who is the bigger idiot: the smart, precocious kid who falls for this running lie, or the audience that falls for this movie.
Preposterousness piles up, even though the child is somehow spared the worst atrocities and never even wonders where his mother and great-uncle disappeared to. Instead, he lets his father's smokescreen screen the smoke from the crematoria, and everything turns to rough play with lots of jokiness. And again the most wonderful things keep happening by chance and more chance, or by the hand of the scriptwriters. In the end, the overjoyed kid faces a full-blown American tank as one of the G.I. liberators even hoists him up into it. Riding, he glimpses his mother, and jumps off the tank into her arms. True, his father has been shot (discreetly off-camera) and he probably won't be allowed to keep that U.S. Army tank, but the film ends as mother and son laugh and embrace in a joyous freeze frame to chill any intelligent viewer's blood.
Comics do not have to be good-looking, but must they be as unappealing as the inverted-eggplant-headed, chinless wonder Benigni, with his passive-aggressive charmlessness and fish-eyed simpletonism? And then there is the angular ploddingness of his real-life spouse Nicoletta Braschi, and her by-the-numbers expressions. The little boy, appropriately not cherubically adorable, is passable but nothing special. But the inane Life Is Beautiful thrives, while a fine Italian film such as Pupi Avati's Best Man vanishes.
