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#81 - Life is Beautiful
Roberto Begnini, 1997
In World War II Italy, an eccentric Jewish man attempts to build a life for himself even as the Nazis move in and start sending people to concentration camps.
I get the impression that this is actually one of those films that you love or you hate. The main pull of this film is the fact that Benigni's protagonist uses his capacity for impressive feats of imagination in order to defend his young son from the horrors of being in a concentration camp. Of course, it takes half the film to actually reach this point, with the first half being the introduction of a bunch of characters who do or do not play a part in the much more important second half. The first half is easy to write off as some whimsical period-piece farce as Benigni's character bumbles his way through a pre-WWII city and manages to befriend or anger a number of characters through his childish but supposedly endearing antics (such as faking his way through being a Nazi educator or winning over his love interest on the basis of the other townspeople's predictable habits). The tendency to rely on convenient coincidences as proof of some greater magic serves the narrative well but its execution isn't particularly entertaining.
The second half is where the film supposedly takes off as Benigni and his family end up in a concentration camp. The premise involving Benigni pretending that being in the camp is an elaborate game for the sake of his son's innocence has some potential but there's something about Benigni's desperately manic energy that ironically doesn't quite sell it. The idea seems to be to make the light-hearted tone of the film's first half translate in part to its much more serious second half but the end result is too tonally inconsistent to take seriously. Not even a certain event happening late in the film that required me to rewind the DVD just to make sure it actually happened was enough to make me reconsider how I wasn't particularly impressed with this film's progression. While technically decent, it doesn't always work as either a comedy or a drama.
Roberto Begnini, 1997
In World War II Italy, an eccentric Jewish man attempts to build a life for himself even as the Nazis move in and start sending people to concentration camps.
I get the impression that this is actually one of those films that you love or you hate. The main pull of this film is the fact that Benigni's protagonist uses his capacity for impressive feats of imagination in order to defend his young son from the horrors of being in a concentration camp. Of course, it takes half the film to actually reach this point, with the first half being the introduction of a bunch of characters who do or do not play a part in the much more important second half. The first half is easy to write off as some whimsical period-piece farce as Benigni's character bumbles his way through a pre-WWII city and manages to befriend or anger a number of characters through his childish but supposedly endearing antics (such as faking his way through being a Nazi educator or winning over his love interest on the basis of the other townspeople's predictable habits). The tendency to rely on convenient coincidences as proof of some greater magic serves the narrative well but its execution isn't particularly entertaining.
The second half is where the film supposedly takes off as Benigni and his family end up in a concentration camp. The premise involving Benigni pretending that being in the camp is an elaborate game for the sake of his son's innocence has some potential but there's something about Benigni's desperately manic energy that ironically doesn't quite sell it. The idea seems to be to make the light-hearted tone of the film's first half translate in part to its much more serious second half but the end result is too tonally inconsistent to take seriously. Not even a certain event happening late in the film that required me to rewind the DVD just to make sure it actually happened was enough to make me reconsider how I wasn't particularly impressed with this film's progression. While technically decent, it doesn't always work as either a comedy or a drama.