Is Life Beautiful

[Jennifer Curtis]

Forthose who did not have the pleasure of watching this incredible movie, I am going to introduce you the main plot. A Jewish-Italian waiter, Guido, meets Dora, a pretty schoolteacher, and wins her over with his charm and humor. Eventually, they marry and have a son named Giosue. However, their happiness is abruptly halted when Guido and Giosue are separated from Dora and taken to a concentration camp.

In the end, the movie has less to do with the Holocaust and more to do with the human feelings and the beautiful relationship of a father and his son. For that reason, some critics highlight that the realism of the movie is not its strong point. Personally, I believe that it is not supposed to be.

Happiness is fleeting. It flits in and out of our days like a bird, singing a beautiful song that we want to revel in all our life, for one moment while the sky is blue, not to be found on the days with dark clouds, heavy winds, and gray skies.

We need the contrasts that fullness, not just happiness, provides us. How else can we know true joy if we have never known sorrow? How can we feel and trust the deepest kind of love if we have never felt heartbreak?

Sometimes, two seemingly conflicting emotions can fit together and coexist. Have you ever felt that? Maybe you have pain inside you that you suppressed, and suddenly another person finds a way to gently bring it to the surface.

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These beautiful people slip into our lives when we least expect it and when we need it the most. They find joy in making your life more delightful. The beauty they create (for you) is often done without the expectation, or even a thought, of receiving anything in return.

I am lucky enough to know a couple of people who make my world more beautiful, but what a brilliant idea to become that person ourselves. A beautiful quote and idea, thank you for linking up. Have a lovely week xx #Candidcuddles

This devotional style workbook features some of Pastor Devlyn Brooks' favorite stories from his three years of writing weekly newspaper columns for Forum Communications Co. This book is about discovering those everyday moments -- the beautiful cracks, if you will -- when we can identify where hope shows up in the sunsets, in our loved ones, in the pets in our lives, in the jobs that sometimes seem so laborious, and yes, even in the times when our hearts are breaking and the world seems like it always and forever will be off kilter. It an an everyday playbook to help you see God and experience the Holy Spirit.

(CNN) -- Roberto Benigni had to be the kind of kid whose parents dragged him out in the living room to sing and tap dance when the neighbors came over. Short of Shirley Temple (or Jim Carrey), I'd be hard pressed to name an actor who's so wildly eager to please, endlessly dancing around and blabbering a hundred miles a minute in a desperate attempt to impress you with his grandstanding humanism.

Evidently it works for a lot of people. Benigni's new movie, "Life is Beautiful" (which he wrote, directed, and stars in) has been wowing them around the world for several months now, and even won the top prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival. Notch up another one for mass hypnosis. By the time "Life is Beautiful" was over, all I wanted to do was pop the guy in the back of the head. The fact that he plays every scene as if he's a very loud mime is bad enough, but there's a patent phoniness to the proceedings that subverts the entire point of the movie.

Benigni plays Guido, an almost psychotically happy-go-lucky Italian in the late 1930s who apparently has little else to do except run around and be as adorable as humanly possible. For a few minutes I enjoyed Benigni's mugging and broad physicality, but the director is so taken with his star he can't really be bothered with much of anything else. With two exceptions, few of the characters in the movie interact with Guido to any constructive degree. They're either simple foils for his jovial pranks (for instance, he likes to steal people's hats and replace them with his own) or barometers for just how squishy-lovey wonderful he's supposed to be.

Several critics have written that the performance is reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, but that's so obviously what Benigni's shooting for it gets embarrassing after a while. He may be adept with a pratfall, but what Benigni's missing is Chaplin's occasional flashes of anger and selfishness, the very things that make him human.

The Little Tramp may have been patient, but if you pushed him far enough, he'd suddenly lash out and kick you in the seat of the pants. Benigni, on the other hand, seems to think that his Tramp's big, fat heart is capable of neutering the most profound forms of evil. All you have to do is jump around and act goofy while wearing an endearing expression.

This is really two movies in one, and (though I wasn't especially impressed with either of them) the first is certainly the most useful. Hour one consists of Guido, who works as a waiter for his uncle, meeting and falling in love with Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife), a pretty local who's engaged to the Fascist town clerk.

It's emblematic of Benigni's style that the couple "meets cute" several times over. Even when Guido finally asks Dora out to dinner, she turns him down because she says she prefers to just stumble upon him every now and then.

Guido ultimately wins Dora over by riding a horse into a fancy dinner party she's attending and literally sweeping her off of her feet. It's the kind of calculated heart-warming moment that's usually found on sitcoms. I guess he couldn't afford to hire a violinist to play under her window while the neighbors look on in their pajamas.

Then the movie jumps ahead several years, to 1945. Guido and Dora are now happily married and have an adorable 5-year-old son named Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini). Once again, though, Giosue isn't actually a character. He's a readily pliant prop for Benigni's cutie-pie antics. Guido's constantly inventing games for the child to get wrapped up in, with the music and camera emphasis playing up our hero's irrepressible spirit.

I think the best way to put it is that Benigni isn't a comic so much as he's a big-hearted clown, the kind that your great aunt used to have paintings of in that creepy hallway. Benigni the screenwriter is perfectly content as long as there's a situation that calls for an elaborate display of Guido's unsinkability. And he comes up with a real doozy in the form of a Nazi concentration camp.

After Guido and Giosue are loaded onto box cars to be shipped off to the camp, Dora selflessly volunteers to climb on, too. So now the whole gang has been transported to hell on Earth, and Guido decides to more or less trick his son into withstanding the coming ordeal. In an even remotely honest movie this little gambit would fail miserably, but Guido (how could we forget) is an irrepressible, life-affirming, heart-warming sunburst of humanity. Everything he does works.

A few critics have been suggesting that the mechanics of the Holocaust are nothing to be making jokes about, and I agree. That's not what's going on here, though. Benigni is not in any way making light of those events, but he creates such a glossy, back-lot version of a concentration camp, he's cheating us before he even begins dealing with the horror.

The absurdities just keep on coming. To begin with, Guido has to hide Giosue in the barracks with the men, since children are immediately shuffled off to their own corner of the prison when they arrive. This is accomplished by having him quickly duck down on one of the top bunks whenever a guard enters the room. Apparently Sgt. Schulz wasn't the only German soldier who saw nothing.

This is silly enough, but the barracks -- which would undoubtedly have been covered with filth, human waste, and, more than occasionally, a dead body -- looks like an uncomfortable place to sleep, but not much more than that.

There's one funny scene where Guido is asked to translate what a German guard is shouting at the prisoners, but he makes up a story about the whole camp being a game where the person who complains the least will accumulate points and win a tank. Giosue buys into this with an enthusiasm that, once again, would be extremely unlikely given the situation.

OK, it might have worked for about 20 minutes, but it seems to me that all you'd need to do is see one rotting corpse sprawled out in front of you -- or watch one innocent person take a bullet in the back of the head -- and the "game" is quickly over. Especially if you're five years old.

Sweet little Giosue never sees rotting corpses, though. It's more like he's trapped in a nasty version of Epcot. There's very little actual killing in the film, and -- in one shot that's supposed to make up for the overriding simplicity of Benigni's vision -- Guido stumbles upon a huge pile of bodies when nobody else is around.

The Nazis may have been horribly precise about what they were doing, but they were not killing thousands of people a day without the other inmates being wholly devastated by their knowledge of the process. And they sure didn't stack the evidence up in a corner where little kids couldn't find it.

That mound of bodies, by the way, comes as a huge shock to Guido, who's been too caught up in comically goose-stepping around his son to confront anything so severe. The character barely perceives anything until it's staring him right in the face.

So, I think it fails miserably. The lesson that Benigni ultimately imparts is that it's easy to convince a child horror doesn't exist as long as it stays out of the way while the two of you are goofing off.

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