The place is clean, and though the work is hard and the rations are short, no one seems to sicken or die. There are references to mass extermination, but that brutal reality is never vividly presented. Indeed, the prisoners don't seem to see much of their jailers, who, when they do turn up, act as if they've drifted into this film from a Hogan's Heroes rerun--barking incomprehensible orders to cover their comic ineptitude.
This is life in a Nazi concentration camp as presented by Roberto Benigni, the star, director and co-writer (with Vincenzo Cerami) of Life Is Beautiful, which has been winning awards and high popularity in Europe. Benigni won't--can't--have it any other way, for even a hint of the truth about the Holocaust would crush his comedy and reduce to absurdity his "fable" about a man named Guido making a sort of hide-and-seek game out of camp life, diverting his four-year-old son (Giorgio Cantarini) from its harshness and encouraging him to lie low. The idea, of course, is to save the boy from the gas chamber, where the young, the old and the sickly--all those who can't work--are automatically sent.
It is perhaps fair to observe that Italian Jewry was spared the worst of genocide. Mussolini's Fascist government only belatedly and halfheartedly embraced the nightmare racial theories of its German ally. Not until after the Italians made a separate peace, late in the war, and the Germans occupied much of their country did deportations begin in earnest. This meant that many Italian Jews stayed only a relatively short time in the camps, which enhanced their chances of survival.
It is also fair to say that Benigni--whose self-love, if not his comic skills, could charitably be described as Chaplinesque, or perhaps more accurately as Robin Williamsish--devotes much of his film to peacetime passages overestablishing Guido's childlike yet shrewd, cheeky yet romantic character as a wise innocent, an idealized Everyman. His pursuit of his principessa, who is engaged to a local Fascist leader (and is sweetly played by Benigni's wife Nicoletta Braschi), and his casually farcical assaults on decorum and authority are, if you have a taste for simpleton comedy, inoffensive.
It would be a pretty thing to think that a gentle, genial spirit like Guido's could effectively resist totalitarianism at its most terrible. But it cannot--unless, of course, you rewrite the past and in the process travesty tragedy. The witnesses to the Holocaust--its living victims--inevitably grow fewer every year. The voices that would deny it ever took place remain strident. The newer generations hurry heedlessly into the future. In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent. Sentimentality is a kind of fascism too, robbing us of judgment and moral acuity, and it needs to be resisted. Life Is Beautiful is a good place to start.
--By Richard Schickel