Life is Beautiful (1998) Review
6/10
A man arrives in Arezzo in 1939, is funny, is relentless, pursues a woman who’s engaged to a fascist official and wins her. Five years later he, she and their son are taken, and he tells the boy that the camp is a competition and the prize is a tank.
The 6 is a contested rating and the contest is the point. The first half is a well-made romantic comedy, the second half is an attempt at something almost nobody would try, and whether the attempt is defensible is the argument the film generates.
My own reaction is split right down the middle. I like the first half a great deal, I think the second half is a gamble that pays off in two scenes and costs the film nearly everywhere else, and Benigni’s win over Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen is a bigger blunder than anything on screen. It’s the least defensible acting result on this page, because the performance is the film’s most doubtful element instead of its strongest.
The First Half Is Good
The Arezzo material is a competent screwball comedy with a clear Italian lineage, and it works on its own terms.
Guido is a physical comedian in the silent tradition. The routines are constructed instead of improvised, the timing is precise, and the sequence where he impersonates a school inspector and delivers a lecture on Aryan physiology is the film’s best joke. It made me laugh out loud, and it’s the scene that makes me wish Benigni had trusted that precision all the way through.
The riddle exchanges with the German doctor are the other construction that works. A man obsessed with puzzles recognizes Guido from before the war, and the audience spends two scenes believing this will matter before learning what the doctor really wants.
The fascism is also present throughout, and the film handles it with more care than its reputation suggests. A horse is painted green with a slogan, an uncle is assaulted, a sign appears on a shop, and the film comments on none of it.
The bookshop refusal is the clearest of them. The shopkeeper tells Guido’s uncle he can’t buy something and is embarrassed instead of hostile, and the film shows an ordinary transaction becoming impossible without anybody raising their voice. Nicoletta Braschi is Benigni’s wife and plays Dora, and the part is thinner than the film needs. She falls for him because the film requires it, and her later decision to board the train is the strongest thing she’s given and arrives without preparation.
She simply demands to be put on it, in front of officials who have no procedure for a woman volunteering, and the film gives her about twenty seconds for what should have been the second half’s foundation.
Establish an oppression through objects and small incidents and the reader assembles a society. A painted horse, a sign, an assault nobody discusses. The alternative is a character explaining the political situation, which readers discount immediately.
Benigni’s own father was held at Bergen-Belsen for two years and told the story to his children in a softened form, which Benigni has cited as the film’s origin. That’s the strongest available defense and it’s a real one. Physical comedy needs construction instead of energy. Benigni’s routines are built, timed and rehearsed. That’s why they land and why his later improvisation doesn’t. A romance that exists because the plot requires it’ll be felt as a requirement. Dora needs a reason and the film gives her a whim.
The Second Half Is the Argument
Guido tells his four-year-old son that the camp is an elaborate game, that points are awarded, and that the first to a thousand wins a tank.
The defense of this is real and worth stating properly. The film isn’t depicting a camp, it’s depicting what one man tells a child inside one, the audience sees the deception instead of the reality, and the gap between them is the film’s method. Benigni has said repeatedly that the fable is Guido’s and not the film’s.
The objection is also real and it’s structural instead of moral. Whatever the film intends, the camp on screen is the camp the audience sees, and a camp in which a child can be concealed for months, in which an inmate can access a loudspeaker, and in which the arithmetic of survival looks like this, is a depiction.
That’s the whole dispute and it doesn’t resolve. The film’s frame says the softness belongs to a father and the film’s images are the only camp the audience is given, and both of those statements are correct.
I can’t settle it either. The defense moves me, especially knowing where the story came from, and then the film shows me a loudspeaker, a hidden child and a camp tidy enough to stage a comedy in, and the objection wins again. That back and forth is most of why this sits at 6.
What has shifted since 1998 is the surrounding context. The film arrived before Shoah had been widely seen outside specialist circles and before the last generation of survivors had largely gone, and a fable now competes with a considerably fuller documentary record.
What Works in It
Two sequences in the second half are strong and neither is a comic one.
The translation scene is the best material in the film, and it’s what keeps my rating from dropping any further. A guard delivers the camp rules in German, Guido volunteers to translate and doesn’t speak German, and he converts the instructions into the rules of the game while the guard shouts. It’s funny, it’s unbearable, and it does the film’s entire argument in three minutes.
The guard also never notices. That’s the detail that makes it work. He shouts the rules, Guido delivers something entirely different in the same rhythm, and the film’s whole method depends on an authority that’s not listening. The record player is the other one. He turns a gramophone toward the women’s compound and plays an aria Dora will recognize, and the sequence is the one time the film’s two halves connect.
The aria is Offenbach, from The Tales of Hoffmann, and it was established in the first half as the music playing when they met. The film plants it an hour earlier and spends it once. That’s the only piece of long construction in the picture.
The ending is also better than its reputation. Guido is taken away, performs a walk for his son who’s hiding, and the film cuts before the shot, and the restraint is the one place Benigni’s instincts are entirely correct.
A single scene can carry an entire argument and it should be the scene where the method is literal. Translation is the film’s method performed on screen, and everything else is an illustration of it. If you have a sequence where your device is enacted instead of employed, that’s your best scene. Cut before the event. The walk and the cut is more effective than any depiction and it’s the clearest evidence that the film knew where its limits were.
Connect your two registers once. The gramophone joins a comedy and a camp in ninety seconds and the film doesn’t attempt it again. Nicola Piovani’s score won and is doing careful work. It’s light, waltzing and slightly mechanical, and it plays through the camp sequences unchanged. That’s the film’s method expressed musically.
The Performance Is the Problem
Benigni directed himself and the performance is undisciplined in a way the material can’t absorb.
Guido talks continuously, at volume, at a pitch that’s calibrated for the first half and is maintained into the second, and the effect in the camp sequences is a man performing energy at the audience and not at his son.
The failure is that the film gives him no private moments. Guido is never shown frightened, never shown calculating, and never shown exhausted, so the audience is asked to infer an interior the performance declines to provide. That’s the stretch where I part company with the film. A single scene of him alone, failing to keep it up, would have changed the whole picture, and I’d have traded ten minutes of mugging for it.
The acceptance speech is also part of the record. He climbed over seats, stood on them, and delivered a lengthy address, and the ceremony’s enthusiasm for it is difficult to separate from the vote that produced it.
He also won Foreign Language Film the same night and went up twice, and the room’s response to the first appearance is visible in the footage of the second. That’s the clearest evidence of how the evening was going.
Hanks and McKellen
Best Actor went to Benigni. The nominees were Hanks for Saving Private Ryan, McKellen for Gods and Monsters, Nick Nolte for Affliction and Edward Norton for American History X.
Hanks’s Miller is a performance about withheld information. A schoolteacher commanding men who don’t know what he was, whose hand shakes, and who delivers the film’s one piece of personal history in a single scene, and the restraint is the achievement.
McKellen’s James Whale is the better argument. A director at the end of his life, physically declining, entirely aware of his own reputation and constructing a last relationship out of very little, and the performance is the most technically accomplished of the five. Nolte in Affliction is also frequently cited and is the most punishing of the five, and any of the four would be a more defensible result than the one the Academy delivered.
Volume reads as commitment and restraint reads as absence, and voting bodies respond to the first. Hanks withholds, McKellen calibrates, and Benigni performs continuously. That’s the same mechanism as every acting entry on this page and it hasn’t changed in thirty years. Giorgio Cantarini was five and is very good. That’s the other thing the film gets right. The boy is bored, is petulant, wants to go home, and behaves like a child instead of like a symbol.
Give your protagonist one private scene where they can’t maintain the front. Without it the reader has no evidence of an interior and must take your word for it.
A director performing in their own film has nobody to tell them they’re doing too much.
That’s the structural risk of the arrangement and it’s visible here. The film also won Foreign Language Film and Best Score, and was nominated for Picture, Director and Screenplay. It’s an enormous haul for an Italian production and reflects a real wave of enthusiasm at the time.
Should you watch Life is Beautiful?
Watch the first half and the translation scene, then decide for yourself. My 6 comes from a comedy I enjoy, two camp sequences I think are close to perfect, and a lead performance that shouts over everything else, including the material that needed quiet. The film earns my respect for trying something this risky, and it loses ground every time Guido performs at the audience instead of at his son.
