It was hard, back in 1997 or so, not to notice Italian comedic actor Roberto Benigni. His film Life Is Beautiful, which he co-wrote, directed, and starred in, was up for multiple awards and even won Oscars for Best Actor, Score, and Foreign Language Film. That wasn’t really what made him hard to notice. No, the parts everyone would remember was his behavior at the various awards shows when he won, running around, climbing over seats, and basically being a happy clown of a man who didn’t seem to care what decorum might think, but he was so charming in his ways that it was mostly taken as the comedy it was meant to be. But as for the movie itself…no, I never really saw it. I knew roughly what it was about, but that was it.
No time like the present to catch up.
Here’s what I knew about the movie: Benigni played a man who, after his family was taken away to a concentration camp, pretended the whole thing was some sort of elaborate game to keep his young son’s spirits up, right up until the man was murdered by the Germans. That was it. However, to my delight, there was a lot more to the movie than that. In point of fact, the first half or so of the movie is about how Guido Orefice (Begnini) romanced his future wife Dora (Begnini’s real life wife Nicoletta Braschi) in the middle of fascist Italy. Dora comes from a well-off family, and her mother really wants her to marry a town official, but in comes Guido, a silly man with the heart of a romantic and not much else. Guido and a friend are staying at Guido’s uncle’s house in town while his uncle works for a nearby high class hotel. Guido does some work there as a waiter, but he really wants to open a book store. Eventually, he wins over Dora, the two get married, and have a son named Giosuè (Giorgio Cantarini). Guido is Jewish, so as time passes, things get a lot harder for him and his uncle and son.
However, well before the family is taken away to the camp, a camp Dora volunteers to go to in order to stay with her family (a plan that doesn’t quite work), Guido is already shielding Giosuè from anti-Semitism the best he can, mostly by suggesting it is something else when the boy has questions or trying to cover it up when his son doesn’t see something. That does lead to the aforementioned game in the camp, a game where Guido jumps through every hoop imaginable in order to both keep his son alive and in good spirits.
That was what I got out of the movie. While it does end with Guido dead, Giosuè does survive and never really experiences the horrors going on around him. The central theme is what a parent will do for his child, and while Guido is not the most conventionally heroic of figures, he does care deeply for his wife and son, doing what he can to keep track of both of them even as the camp is divided by gender and even trying to see his wife could easily get him killed. There’s a certain amount of courage in Guido, seen from the very beginning as he romances Dora while she is expected to marry a much more financially stable fascist. He doesn’t care that he looks ridiculous. He only cares for the well-being of his loved ones, and humor in the face of horror can be a powerful weapon.
Now, much of my familiarity with Benigni’s work up until this point was his small roles in a couple of Jim Jarmusch movies, so seeing him in a starring role was actually a real treat. It takes a special talent to find something approaching humor in the Holocaust, and Begnini did so not by mocking what was happening but by showing humor as a weapon against it, even ending the movie with a punchline as young Giosuè seems to get the promised prize for winning the game and without seeing his father’s corpse. If the title seems ironic given the subject matter, Begnini doesn’t really shy away from the harsher realities–the last shot of Guido’s poor uncle underline that–but he instead tells a sweet story about challenging adversity the only way a man like Guido knows how: with a big goofy grin so he doesn’t worry his family.
Grade: A
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