walgis neilsen viliami
Martta Borromeo
My kids loved the movie, too. Mind you, this is a foreign-made movie with subtitles (though my kids have had plenty of practice watching operas, which always have subtitles). I took Jonah to Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC a few years ago. This movie had a much bigger impact on him than the Holocaust museum, because it humanizes people. It shows the simple, ugly transition from a sunny everyday life to the dark horror of a concentration camp.
Unlike most Hollywood movies that you forget about right after you leave the theater, this is a film that moves you; it stays with you. As I was tucking Hannah into bed yesterday, she was still asking me about this movie.
The second chapter of the story takes a darker turn. Throughout the first half of the film we get hints to how Europe is changing as World War 2 approaches and anti-Jewish sentiment surfaces. But Guido wants to shield young Joshua from these things and he does it the only way he knows how. He puts on performances and depicts things in comical ways. His goal is to keep his son focused in the goodness and beauty of life. That becomes harder when Guido, Dora, and Joshua are rounded up and taken to a Nazi concentration camp. But even in those brutal circumstances and regardless of the death and misery surrounding them, Guido is determined to safeguard his son through his blithe fictional creations.
I did, live actually. Before I saw the movie in the question. Live I hated the speeches, hated them so much I vowed to not see the film. Then, I realized I was being stupid (and more than a little ethnocentric), so I broke my promise.
Thanks man! I really have a hard time with the criticisms mainly because the movie does nothing to mock or take lightly the horrors of the Holocaust. All of the humor flows from this one man and it is completely consistent with his character. If it were making light of the Holocaust I would definitely have an issue with it.
Some people become clowns; others have clownhood thrust upon them. It is impossible to regard Roberto Benigni without imagining him as a boy in school, already a cutup, using humor to deflect criticism and confuse his enemies. He looks goofy and knows how he looks. I saw him once in a line at airport customs, subtly turning a roomful of tired and impatient travelers into an audience for a subtle pantomime in which he was the weariest and most put-upon. We had to smile.
"Life Is Beautiful" is the role he was born to play. The film falls into two parts. One is pure comedy. The other smiles through tears. Benigni, who also directed and co-wrote the movie, stars as Guido, a hotel waiter in Italy in the 1930s. Watching his adventures, we are reminded of Chaplin.
He arrives in town in a runaway car with failed brakes and is mistaken for a visiting dignitary. He falls in love instantly with the beautiful Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife). He becomes the undeclared rival of her fiance, the Fascist town clerk. He makes friends with the German doctor (Horst Buchholz) who is a regular guest at the hotel and shares his love of riddles. 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.
All 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. Only well into the movie do we even learn the crucial information that Guido is Jewish. 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. Mistaken for a school inspector, he invents a quick lecture on Italian racial superiority, demonstrating the excellence of his big ears and superb navel.
Several years pass, offscreen. Guido and Dora are married and dote on their 5-year-old son Joshua (Giorgio Cantarini). 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 Joshua are loaded into a train, and Guido instinctively tries to turn it into a game to comfort his son. He makes a big show of being terrified that somehow they will miss the train and be left behind. Dora, not Jewish, would be spared by the Fascists, but insists on coming along to be with her husband and child.
In the camp, Guido constructs an elaborate fiction to comfort and protect his son. It is all an elaborate game, he explains. 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. 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. 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.
At this year's Toronto Film Festival, Benigni told me that the movie has stirred up venomous opposition from the right wing in Italy. At Cannes, it offended some left-wing critics with its use of humor in connection with the Holocaust. What may be most offensive to both wings is its sidestepping of politics in favor of simple human ingenuity. The film finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter. And Benigni isn't really making comedy out of the Holocaust, anyway. He is showing how Guido uses the only gift at his command to protect his son. If he had a gun, he would shoot at the Fascists. If he had an army, he would destroy them. He is a clown, and comedy is his weapon.
The movie actually softens the Holocaust slightly, to make the humor possible at all. In the real death camps there would be no role for Guido. But "Life Is Beautiful" is not about Nazis and Fascists, but about the human spirit. It is about rescuing whatever is good and hopeful from the wreckage of dreams. About hope for the future. About the necessary human conviction, or delusion, that things will be better for our children than they are right now.
Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
We tend, therefore, to valorize those films that show we do not fall for the baits of the entertainment industry (sentimentalism, media-hype, easy-to-understand plots, immediate pleasures). To complicate things further, we do not appreciate being reminded of all this, as if recognizing that the social function of our cultural habits diminish their value. Our tastes, choices, and reactions must appear as the result of freedom, talent, and intelligence rather than of socio-cultural logic, apprenticeship, and privilege.
It is time to confront the air of Eastern philosophies that transpires from Life Is Beautiful. I do not know whether Benigni has joined the ranks of the many Buddheo-Christians populating the Western hemisphere these days, but to better understand this film, the game and the fairy tale, we must now enlarge a detail in the film and make a philosophical detour.
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I think the most meaningful films about the Holocaustare small European movies that allow us to get involved with a single personor family in their town or village and let us observe up close the impactof evil on people we have come to genuinely care about.
Life is Beautiful, written, directed byand starring Roberto Benigni, is indeed such a movie and follows in thefine European tradition of The Shop on Main Street and Europa,Europa, carefully blending a bit of comedy with the wrenching sorrowresulting from the systematic roundup and deportation of Jews to concentrationcamps.
This movie is divided into two main parts, thefirst featuring the charming, romantic buffoonery of the Italian-JewishGuido Orefice, played by Benigni, who has come to work as a waiter in hisuncle's fancy hotel in 1939.
Roberto Benigni struck me as part Jerry Lewisand part Harpo Marx, utilizing slap stick, prat falls and running jokessuch as stealing other guys' hats, and later pretending to be an ItalianFascist while dressed only in his underwear.
He sets his romantic sights on the pretty schoolteacher Dora, played by Nicoletta Braschi, and literally sweeps her offher feet, saving her from what promised to be a tedious marriage to a boringmember of the local upper crust.
After all of the funny romantic stuff, the filmjumps ahead five years or so, assuming their marriage with the appearanceof a young son named Giosu, an adorable little fellow played byGiorgio Cantarini. By this time, the Nazis have occupied their town andhave begun harassing Jews, including posting signs on non-Jewish shopssaying 'no Jews or dogs allowed.' The little boy wants to know why thisis so. Guido invents a false answer and thus begins a pattern of creativedeception to shield the boy from the ugly reality.
On the day of little Giosu's sixth birthdayparty, Guido and the boy are abruptly hauled off for deportation alongwith all of the town's Jews. Upon entering the box car at the train depot,Guido answers his son's inquiry about what is going on by pretending theentire thing is a game and the goal is to follow papa's rules and win points.It works, the boy likes this game.
The brilliance of this film is that it shiftsto the little boy's point of view once they enter the concentration campseemingly to play papa's fascinating new game in which the goal is to outwityour opponents, the SS, and tally a thousand points to win a genuine tank.This takes place amid a scenario in which the Nazis routinely gas all ofthe old people and young children considered unfit for work.
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