It is about rescuing whatever is good and hopeful from the wreckage of dreams. But "Life Is Beautiful" is not about Nazis and Fascists, but about the human spirit. In the real death camps there would be no role for Guido.
The movie actually softens the Holocaust slightly, to make the humor possible at all. If he had an army, he would destroy them. If he had a gun, he would shoot at the Fascists. He is showing how Guido uses the only gift at his command to protect his son. And Benigni isn't really making comedy out of the Holocaust, anyway. The film finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter. What may be most offensive to both wings is its sidestepping of politics in favor of simple human ingenuity. At Cannes, it offended some left-wing critics with its use of humor in connection with the Holocaust. And he literally hides the child from the camp guards, with rules of the game that have the boy crouching on a high sleeping platform and remaining absolutely still.Īt this year's Toronto Film Festival, Benigni told me that the movie has stirred up venomous opposition from the right wing in Italy. Guido acts as the translator for a German who is barking orders at the inmates, freely translating them into Italian designed to quiet his son's fears. The first one to get 1,000 points will win a tank-not a toy tank but a real one, which Joshua can drive all over town. It is all an elaborate game, he explains. In the camp, Guido constructs an elaborate fiction to comfort and protect his son. Dora, not Jewish, would be spared by the Fascists, but insists on coming along to be with her husband and child. He makes a big show of being terrified that somehow they will miss the train and be left behind. Guido and Joshua are loaded into a train, and Guido instinctively tries to turn it into a game to comfort his son. In 1945, near the end of the war, the Jews in the town are rounded up by the Fascists and shipped by rail to a death camp.
Guido and Dora are married and dote on their 5-year-old son Joshua ( Giorgio Cantarini). Mistaken for a school inspector, he invents a quick lecture on Italian racial superiority, demonstrating the excellence of his big ears and superb navel. Dora, a gentile, quickly comes to love him, and in one scene even conspires to meet him on the floor under a banquet table they kiss, and she whispers, "Take me away!" In the town, Guido survives by quick improvisation.
Only well into the movie do we even learn the crucial information that Guido is Jewish. And by the fantastic manipulation of carefully planned coincidences, he makes it appear that he is fated to replace the dour Fascist in Dora's life.Īll of this early material, the first long act of the movie, is comedy-much of it silent comedy involving the fate of a much-traveled hat. He makes friends with the German doctor ( Horst Buchholz) who is a regular guest at the hotel and shares his love of riddles. He becomes the undeclared rival of her fiance, the Fascist town clerk. He falls in love instantly with the beautiful Dora ( Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife). He arrives in town in a runaway car with failed brakes and is mistaken for a visiting dignitary.
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