In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin looks back on his 1940 Hitler burlesque The Great Dictator and confesses, “Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made [the film].” When Roberto Benigni premiered Life Is Beautiful at Cannes 58 years later, he no doubt welcomed comparisons to the Chaplin film, which the Italian comedian had essentially updated for a post-Schindler’s List world. Instead of sublimating the realities of the Holocaust, Benigni embraced them, facing his Chaplinesque clown persona with mass extermination. His struggle to keep the light of laughter going amidst overwhelming darkness is the tragedy that ultimately moves Life Is Beautiful through its Bergen-Belsen-set final moments. If mugging at the gas chambers seems like poor taste, that’s the point: The tonal disjunct is meant to show just how dark that darkness had to be, to get the better even of the irrepressible Benigni.
That disjunct is what compelled me to seek out Life Is Beautiful 15 or so years ago. In my early teens, a budding cinema autodidact, and adamant as only a pompous teenager could be that nothing was off-limits to comedy, I had to see if and how Benigni pulled it off. Emboldened in part by my Jewish upbringing, I was eager to fight the forces of over-sensitivity in the name of comedy. Failing that, I could militate against prestige picture tearjerking. How I ended up feeling, and how I still feel after revisiting the film as an adult, was beyond both positions: That Benigni had gravely undersold the power and potential of the comic.
I might have been tipped off by how starkly the film separates humor from seriousness. Life Is Beautiful is bisected into a comic before, and a tragicomic after. In the first act, Benigni’s Guido Orefice arrives in the Tuscan city Arezzo with his best friend Ferruccio (Sergio Bustric) to wait tables at a restaurant owned by his Uncle Eliseo (Giustino Durano) and take up residence in Eliseo’s unused villa. In short order, Guido falls in love with a local schoolteacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni’s wife), and a series of meet-cutes, a rescue via horseback and a five-year ellipsis later, they’re married with a child, the cherubic Joshua (Giorgio Cantarini).
Their bliss is short-lived. Almost as soon as we discover Guido is Jewish (Orefice is a common surname of Italian Jews), he, Joshua, Eliseo and Dora—who, despite being Goyim, insists on accompanying her family—are carted off to the camps. There, Life Is Beautiful sets about its primary dramatic concept: the desperate ruse by which Guido conceals the Final Solution from his son. As Guido tells it, what may seem from all available evidence to be imprisonment and systematic genocide is, in fact, an elaborate playground game.
Let’s not mince words: This is Holocaust denial, sentimentalized beyond recognition as such. Older, wiser and surrounded by peers with broods of their own, I feel more charitable towards Guido’s actions than I did as a young man, when being condescended to by adults was still a fresh memory. That doesn’t mean his fibs don’t become perverse as they grow more ornate. In a late scene, Guido volunteers to translate a stormtrooper’s orders to a roomful of new Jewish prisoners, even though he doesn’t speak German. He uses the opportunity to “translate” the rules of the imaginary game, which include disqualification when players ask for snacks or their mommies. Reaction shots show cramped, weary, blank faces, presumed to be too physically and existentially exhausted to propose that the stormtrooper’s actual words might be significant to their survival.
Film scholar Maurizio Viano, in the only really worthwhile defense of Life Is Beautiful, reads moments like this one as awkward encounters between the literal and allegorical sides of the film. In Guido’s “game,” signs of innocence—the stormtrooper’s imagined attachment to strawberry jam—substituted for horrific reality, just as real-life dangers (according to Viano) are swapped out for make-believe in fairy tales. Life Is Beautiful indeed never tires of reminding us that it is a fairy tale. Magic realist logic governs the first half in particular, as slapstick routines and scenes of romance are structured by coincidences and flights of fancy, and emotional appeals depend on callbacks to significant phrases and lietmotifs. Because the concentration camp defies this logic, Guido is duty-bound to contain it within his own creative symbolic universe.
As Viano notes, the immaculate harmony of Benigni’s dualistic narrative, like his highbrow references to Schopenhauer and Rimbaud, elevate Life Is Beautiful above the cultural ghetto to which his populist comedy is routinely doomed. Certainly the Cannes jury recognized as much, awarding him their Grand Prix for his efforts. Viano further argues that the ultimate success of Guido’s scheme, albeit at the cost of his life, represents a spiritual triumph, in which the victims of atrocity are allowed to transcend their material circumstances through thought and belief in orders beyond the mortal.
Viano’s analysis, however, makes some key oversights. It goes without saying that a film using its manufactured coincidences to argue for faith engages in tautology. More to the point is that the allegorical system of Life Is Beautiful is, by the second half, a form of deception, however arguably justified. Comedy, as embodied by Guido/Benigni’s antic, ingratiating clowning, is necessarily also deceptive. Guido’s pranks conceal and distract rather than illuminate. The comic is reduced to comic relief: It stands ready at the sidelines, on call to heal the injuries sustained from the serious stuff, armed with pratfalls, puns and eggs smashed on heads. Comedy’s aggressive, dialectical aspect is diminished to nonexistence, made a sentimental martyr of evil rather than its active adversary.
It’s little more than the art cinema Patch Adams.
One moment of Life Is Beautiful suggests the film that could have been. While imprisoned, Guido encounters Doctor Lessing (Horst Buchholz), who he used to serve regularly in Arezzo. Now a high-ranking officer of the Nazis, Lessing regularly sought Guido’s guidance to solve riddles. He visibly softens when confronted with Guido at the camp, suggesting to Guido his sense of empathy. When he asks Guido one night to speak in private, Guido is convinced he plans on helping Joshua and Dora escape. Instead, with grave seriousness, the doctor asks him to help solve a riddle. Tears well up in Lessing’s eyes as he begs for Guido’s help; Guido is left speechless by his inanity. It’s a dark moment, and yet horrifically funny, ruthlessly targeting the gulf of privilege that blinds the powerful to human suffering, keeping them safely cocooned in the realm of fairy tales.