Life Is Beautiful
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Life Is Beautiful (in Italian La vita è bella) is a 1997 Italian language film which tells the story of an Italian Jew, Guido Orefice (played by Roberto Benigni, who also directed the film), who lives in his own world: a romantic fairy tale, but must learn how to use that dreamy quality to survive a concentration camp. The film won Academy Awards for Best Music, Original Dramatic Score and Best Foreign Language Film, and Benigni won Best Actor for his role. The film was additionally nominated for Academy Awards for Directing, Film Editing, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay, and is ranked 77th on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 rated films as of July 2006.
Benigni was publicly praised by Jewish groups for embracing and publicizing the Holocaust. Others praised him for his daring and creative skill in successfully making a sensitive comedy about the tragedy, an artistic challenge that even Charlie Chaplin admitted he would not have attempted with The Great Dictator had he known the full horrors committed in Nazi Germany. Yet some have criticized Benigni for trivializing the Holocaust as sort of a childish game (even though in the movie the "game" was invented to keep Giosue from being too exposed to the horrors he is living through). One of the main critics is Israeli screenwriter Kobi Niv in his book Life is Beautiful, But Not for Jews (Scarecrow Press, 2003).
Plot
The first half of the movie is a whimsical, romantic comedy and often slapstick. Guido, a young Italian Jew, arrives in a big city where he sets up a bookstore. Guido is both funny and charismatic, especially when he romances Dora (Italian, but not Jewish), whom he steals – at her engagement – from her rude and loud fiancé. Several years pass, in which Guido and Dora have a son, Giosuè (written Joshua in the English subtitles).In the second half of the movie, Guido, his uncle, and Giosuè are taken to a concentration camp on Giosuè's birthday. Not wanting to leave her family, Dora asks to be allowed to join them and is permitted to do so. In an attempt at keeping up Giosuè's spirits, Guido convinces him that the camp is just a game – a game in which the first person to get a thousand points wins a tank. He convinces Giosuè that the camp guards are mean because they want the tank for themselves, that all the other children are hiding in order to win the game, and puts off every attempt of Giosuè's ending the game and returning home by convincing him that they are in the lead for the tank. Despite being surrounded by rampant death and disease, Giosuè doesn't question this fiction both because of his father's convincing performance and his own innocence.
Guido maintains this story right until the end, when – in the chaos caused by the American advance drawing near – he tells his son to stay in a mailbox until everybody has left, this being the final test before the tank is his. Guido is killed while trying to warn Dora that the trucks go to the gas chambers. Giosuè manages to survive, and thinks he's won the game when an American tank arrives to liberate the camp, and is reunited with his mother by the American tank commander.
See also
- The Day the Clown Cried (1972), an unfinished film by Jerry Lewis
- Train de Vie by Radu Mihaileanu
External links
- [Life is Beautiful] at the [Arts & Faith Top100 Spiritually Significant Films] list
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