Pros: A charming first hour with an undeniably talented farceur.
Cons: The second hour dishonest, sentimental to wretchedness.
The Bottom Line: I stand with an evidently small defiant band in feeling we should not applaud a talented Italian farceur for outdoing us in trivialization and sentimental vulgarity.
Perhaps I have a problem with movies about The Holocaust. I had my objections (just one really) to Steven Spielberg' SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993), but I would send anyone to see that sentimentally flawed, technically superb film, rather than LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (1997).
In our boredom today, in our need to fill the maw where our souls should be, we will embrace anything to pass our time, to make us feel good, to give us the illusion of being in control. And in order to make a buck (or in this case, a lira), entertainers and producers will do anything to satisfy us.
I do not object to films about The Holocaust. Every day, in the new Millenium -- full of ourselves, our greedy consumer satifactions, our technical accomplishments -- we need to be reminded of what else we are capable. Please find the best of them, watch SHOAH (Claude Lanzmann, 1985). Be warned, it is not "entertaining"; it takes eight and a half hours to see; but it is worth every minute of your time. Watch Lanzmann examine survivors and persecutors in Poland and elsewhere, and deftly reveal truths about each group.
See THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE (Heinz Schirk, 1984), a docudrama, based on a stenographic record of the prosaic 1942 bureaucratic meeting of Nazis in a suburb of Berlin, where the deaths of millions of humans were hashed out, planned and agreed to. For it is not that millions were killed that is unique.
Early in this Century, we called a halt to The Indian Wars, which, over 200 years, had claimed at least 10,000,000 Native Americans and destroyed whole nations of indigenous people. The Armenians were butchered in comparable numbers by the Turks in 1915. Millions died at the hands of the Japanese on their way into China, from 1931 on. Stalin eliminated 30,000,000 in the Gulags. World War II caused the deaths of what is now estimated at 85,000,000 Worldwide.
No, it is not the deaths of the Jews in World War II that is unique. It is the -- not just cold -- the cool blooded skill, efficiency, and calculation with which Heydrich, Himmler, Eichmann and the rest planned and carried out their murders. (And of course, at the same time, they got rid of the Militant Trade Unionists, the Communists, the Homosexuals, the Mentally Retarded, the Insane, the Gypsies, the Seventh Day Adventists -- on and on -- anyone else they deemed Inferior.) Let the idiots who deny The Holocaust shave off a million here or a million there. This was a conspiracy!
Films on these slaughters often contain elements of humor -- ironic, macabre, perhaps -- but humor. (And of course, one is struck by how matter of fact, how common place, these monstrous crimes were, at the time, to most of the people who witnessed or took part in them -- think about Ruwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, East St Louis, Tulsa.) But no film that I can think of turns a monstrous complex of crimes into a stage for a talented clown who will use any subject to turn a buck.
Yes, along comes pleasant, little, Chaplinesque, Carrey-Williams wannabe Roberto Benigni, a successful Italian director/comedian and, despite his absurd stchik at 1997 Oscars, something of an intellectual. I doubt he set out to make a bad movie. It must have been deep in his nature and sense of taste to produce one eventually so abysmal. (The mystery is why tens of millions mindlessly shared his taste. Shall we all eventually think that everything from blowing up cats to gassing people is funny?)
I have no problem with bad movies, especially ones that don't take themselves too seriously. Despite some lapses in taste, I enjoyed, for instance, films like ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES (1997) and some of its sequels, such THE KILLER TOMATOES EAT FRANCE (1991). And these films have been nominated as the worst films ever made! I urge people to see CANNIBAL WOMEN IN THE AVOCADO JUNGLE OF DEATH (1989). This film is very funny, but I would almost recommend it for its inspired title alone. If one dares to look deeply into these movies, one can find serious subjects: the environment, the harassment of women, etc., but that is not why we may stay up with them on late night TV.
They do not, however, suggest that The Holocaust was a few weeks in an uncomfortable summer camp. Therefore, they are not taken seriously. They do not win awards from The Academy and The British Film Institute!
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL starts as a bucolic, simple romantic comedy, enjoyable for the first hour, both witty and full of slap stick, and leads us laughing right into the place of horrors. Then, it says, it's okay. We can laugh here, too.
Of course, people found humor in the concentration camps. We have to find humor in the most terrible of situations, or we go mad (as many did). But to wring laughs out of The Holocaust so easily and, from my point of view, so dishonestly, made my gorge rise, almost literally.
Let me give one example out of many, and I'll be done with it. Benigni plays a little man, a sly innocent. We think of Chaplin's proletarian figure in MODERN TIMES (1936) or Adenoid Hynkel's little man counterpart in THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940). In the first hour of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, Director Benigni has him thwart the Fascists, win the girl, open a business in pre-war Italy. He really should have stopped there, while he was ahead.
The second hour or so takes place five years later. The couple have a little boy, and they are all taken away to a camp because Benigni is Jewish and defiant. This misfortune is perhaps surprising, given his wife's family Fascist connections.
From that point on, in a German run camp, we are asked to believe that Benigni would be allowed to jump around (among people who presumably are being worked to death), make jokes, play tricks, to entertain his son, and to inoculate the tiny boy from their surroundings. I ask you to consider the scenes in the camp barracks where, with scores of exhausted prisoners lying all around them, Benigni laughs, whistles, tells stories -- all in a loud voice. He has evidently been doing this regularly, for it is his nature.
If the Nazis didn't stop him, don't you think some of these people would have roused themselves? I expected at least one of them to cry out of exasperation, "We've been working for 12 hours while somehow you've managed to play. SHUT UP, YOU IDIOT! You'll bring the guards. We need our sleep!" (It might give the kind of realistic touch the film needs, here and there, throughout.) If that had happened JUST ONCE! I so craved a saving element of realism and irony that some of these poor people recognized that
Begnini' Guido was a jerk.
But no one says a word. No one reacts at all. They all lie there like dummies, for in this picture, that is what they are. I can't say I hate many pictures. This is one of them.
And he won an Oscar! And waved it around like James Cameron!
I fear next he will try for a slap stick masterpiece about Aids. Or a musical set in an abortion clinic.
Save your rental fee. The cost of the laughs comes too high!
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