"Life is Beautiful" (1998)

“To laugh and to cry comes from the same point of the soul, no? I’m a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry. It doesn’t matter if it’s comedy or tragedy. They’re the same if you reach the beauty.”

--Roberto Benigni, Director, Screenwriter and Star of “Life is Beautiful”

The situation in which we find ourselves sometimes makes me sad and angry. 

My life’s meaning has been through human interaction.  To be cut off from neighbors, friends, and good people I encounter every day saddens me.  I’m grateful for my smart-phone and laptop, which give me opportunities to reach out, make contact, and receive encouragement and support in return.  Yet, in spite of the benefits of digital everything, nothing can replace the reassuring warmth, the stress-coping human bond, of a handshake or a hug. 

  

There are “experts” everywhere, but no one is sure about anything.  We are scolded into staying in our homes and keeping our distance, and driven to constant, low-grade anxiety by individuals who appear daily on TV, standing inches from many others around them, oblivious to social distancing.   These doomsayers who don’t follow their own advice cause me anger and frustration.  I stopped watching all but the local the news.

I understand the need to distance ourselves, to protect ourselves and others.  I try to keep hopeful and upbeat, in spite of the pundits who pick at our fear, like a wound that won’t heal, with worst-case scenarios.  Although I get how precarious this is, the forced separations, the loss of income, the constant rebukes from the news, and the sacrifices made by innocent people who suffer because our leaders and experts dropped the ball, stirs up those moments of sadness and anger.

It’s not all terrible, however.  I am lucky to have a loving husband, who I can talk to, hold on to, and vent to, even argue with. We look after each other. We make each other laugh in goofy ways. We take walks on the desert trails near our home (as long as they remain open).  Yoga in front of the TV helps.  So do movies. And meal times. And more long walks.  Jogging.  Reading.  Scrabble.  Puzzles.  It takes a little effort to remain calm and hopeful, to keep my perspective that this, too, will pass. 

Laughter and whimsy can also help, as demonstrated in the next film.

The lengths to which we go to protect each other in times of crisis, especially our children, and how we cope when we are unable to be near our loved ones, is the theme of the 1998 Italian film “Life is Beautiful”.  Roberto Benigni stars as Guido, the remarkable central character who uses humor, imagination, and the sheer will of his mind, to endure one of the worst experiences imaginable, and keep his loved ones safe and hopeful. 

A big-hearted Italian-Jewish bookstore owner in pre-WWII Italy, with an ebullient, fairy tale spirit, Guido is not too concerned with the signs of danger around him.  He woos his “principessa”, Dora, in a series of amusing, slapstick coincidences (with help from his half-baked idea of Schopenhauer’s philosophy), and wins her hand.

In one of the film’s brilliant transitions, suggesting the passage of time, Guido and Dora have a son, Giosue, a playful and precious little boy who Guido adores.  The war, now gripping Italy, proves treacherous to this small family.

In the second half of “Life is Beautiful”, Guido and Giosue are rounded up and shipped to a concentration camp, while Dora, who is not Jewish, insists on boarding their train.  Guido faces an impossibly tragic task: helping his 5-year-old son survive their captivity, while suffering unbearable separation from Dora, who is imprisoned on the other side of the same camp.

Guido convinces Giosue that their confinement is all a game, concocting a wild and ever-escalating scenario for his small son: play by the rules, don’t cry, don’t ask for a snack, and hide from the people who yell a lot, and earn enough points to win the Grand Prize, a real tank.  Guido, the loving father and clown, creates a story that his son can believe in, and he forces his own merriment, to preserve the illusion for Giosue, and protect him from fear and despair. 

The depiction of the camp is not extreme.  Nevertheless, brief images are loaded with significance: a chimney spewing black smoke; the sight of the elderly getting undressed for the showers; a fog-enshrouded image of a mound of human skeletons.

The forced separation between Guido and Dora is heart-wrenching.  Guido’s ability to communicate with Dora on the camp loudspeaker, just as she fears that all of the children in the camp have been killed, is a creative form of our modern electronic communication.  Guido and Giosue call out to her, so she knows they are still alive.  He plays a record the Offenbach aria, one that first drew them together, and her expression of anguish and relief is one of the film’s moments of real beauty.  Speaking of music, Nicola Piovani’s lush, sentimental Oscar-winning score is one of the reasons  “Life is Beautiful” is such a deeply emotional experience.

Begnini’s screenplay was inspired by Auschwitz survivor Rubino Salmoni, whose book, “In the End, I Beat Hitler”,  used humor to tell his story; and by Begnini’s father Luigi, who was interred in a Nazi labor camp for two years, and who found comfort in humorously relating his fearful experiences to young Roberto. The film is Benigni’s tribute to both men. 

Begnini, who also directed and co-wrote the screenplay, took an incredible risk with this film.  There is a fragile balance between the Chaplinesque, romantic slapstick of the first half, and the pointed, understated images of the labor camp the second half. 

Many viewers feel that the film pushes too hard for comic effect. True, the humor is very broad, especially at first.  Guido is, shall we say, generous and boisterous, maybe a tad too loud.  This is perhaps more acceptable in the Italian culture (my mother was Italian).  To the film’s credit, its slow introduction of its theme, with effective foreshadowing in the first half, keep the comedy from becoming too grating.

I think the complaints leveled at the film, that its comedy and wild mix of tones is inappropriate for the material, have missed the point.  “Life is Beautiful”, as described at the start by an unseen narrator, is “a fable...like a fable, it is filled with sorrow…and wonder and happiness”   The narrator returns at the end, and when we realize from whose point of view this story is actually told, it makes perfect, poignant sense.  Keep some Kleenex handy. 

“Life is Beautiful” opened to critical acclaim and enormous popularity, winning three Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor for Benigni.  It’s an old-fashioned comedy about a grim subject. Maybe it will provide some comfort, some small strategy for coping.  Maybe this time will prove to be an ultimate fable.