Life is Beautiful (1998) Review

A man arrives in Arezzo in 1939, is funny, is relentless, pursues a woman who is 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 whole thing is a competition and the prize is a tank.

The 6 is a genuinely 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.

What I can say without hedging is that Benigni’s win over Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen is 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 specific 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.

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 handled with more care than the film’s reputation suggests. A horse is painted green with a slogan, an uncle is assaulted, a sign appears on a shop, and none of it is commented on.

The bookshop refusal is the clearest of them. Guido’s uncle is told he cannot buy something, the shopkeeper 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 is 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.

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 is not depicting a camp, it is 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 is 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 is the whole dispute and it does not 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.

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 genuinely strong and neither is a comic one.

The translation scene is the best material in the film. A guard delivers the camp rules in German, Guido volunteers to translate and does not speak German, and he converts the instructions into the rules of the game while the guard shouts. It is funny, it is unbearable, and it is doing the film’s entire argument in three minutes.

The guard also never notices, which is 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 is 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, which is 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 is hiding, and the film cuts before the shot, and the restraint is the one place Benigni’s instincts are entirely correct.

The Performance Is the Problem

Benigni directed himself and the performance is undisciplined in a way the material cannot absorb.

Guido talks continuously, at volume, at a pitch that is 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 specific failure is that the film gives him no private moments. Guido is never shown frightened, never shown calculating, and never shown exhausted, which means the audience is asked to infer an interior the performance declines to provide. A single scene of him alone, failing to keep it up, would have changed the whole picture.

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, which is 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 do not 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.

Should you watch Life is Beautiful?

The first half, and the translation scene, and then decide for yourself. A well-made comedy that becomes an attempt almost nobody would make, two sequences that are genuinely extraordinary, a performance with no private moments anywhere in it, and an argument that has not resolved in twenty-seven years.

Frequently Asked Questions