Life is Beautiful (1998): An Appreciation

Uploaded 16 April 1999 | Modified 7 June 1999

Many serious critics, at home and abroad, have acknowledged the charms of Benigni’s film, Life is Beautiful, but maintain a principled resistance to those charms. Their grounds are familiar ones: linking pleasure and humour with the Holocaust, that most horrific chapter in modern Jewish history, is tasteless at best, immoral at worst; failing to treat the subject in a tone of high seriousness and moral earnestness means trivializing it. This attitude has become almost a knee-jerk reaction. It allows righteous people to dismiss and deplore films, plays and novels, without examining them; and it produces disavowals from intelligent people who have succumbed to the experience of pleasure but who feel they can’t be seen to approve such apparent light-heartedness.

The critical reception (as opposed to the popular response) to Life is Beautiful is saddening and sobering. For it demonstrates two major shortcomings in our public intellectuals: a narrow and prescriptive approach to artistic production; and a lack of appreciation of the art of comedy.

Like tragedy, comedy developed in ancient Greece from religious ritual into a popular theatrical genre. Although devalued by Aristotle, who rated it inferior to tragedy, it was (and remains) equally concerned with the limitations and aspirations of human beings; but was (and remains) more pointed in its social criticism, in its irreverence towards existing social institutions. Comedy is more radical than tragedy, which is profoundly conservative in its assertion of the inexorability of fate. It is also more democratic, because it is concerned with the lives of ordinary people rather than the problems of exceptional individuals.

Because comedy celebrates man’s capacity to endure the most excruciating trials and tribulations, humiliations and oppressions, and because of its irreverent attitude towards figures of authority, it has been especially popular with the powerless. It is not for nothing that comedy thrived in the shtetl and in the immigrant Jewish communities of America, which spawned a host of Jewish comedians for stage, radio, film and television.

Theatrical comedy is commonly divided into old and new comedy. The former refers to the ribald social and political comedy of ancient Greece (Aristophanes, in particular); the latter to the romantic comedy (of playwrights like Shakespeare). Life is Beautiful combines elements of both: it ridicules the theories, institutions and authority figures of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; and it celebrates the fairytale romance of Guido and his princess. The camp survival game (with tank prize), conceived by Guido to sustain young Giosue in body and spirit, can be seen as another version of the wish-fulfilment fantasies of old comedy.

But, of course, Life is Beautiful is a film, and derives as much from its antecedents in film comedy as from its theatrical antecedents. The early comic action sequences of Guido’s car careering out of control and scattering a public reception, of landing his princess in the hay, and gags to do with work as a waiter owe much to the tradition of silent slapstick comedy. The ridiculing of the form and content of Fascist and Nazi rhetoric owes much to the Chaplin of The Great Dictator (1940). Guido the clown is a “playboy” (homo ludens), who enjoys games and pranks, in the tradition of the Marx brothers; while the Fascist figures in the film, like the figures of authority and the Establishment in Marx Brothers films, are represented as “killjoys” – earnest, vain, pompous and humourless. Comedy theorist Harry Levin, who coined these terms, claims we laugh with the playboys, and at the killjoys. We, the audience, enter into a conspiratorial relationship with the playboy, who is alive, alert and aware in his playfulness and game-playing, in contrast to the dead-pan thick-headedness, self-absorption and insensitivity of the killjoys. In the light of this distinction, it is interesting to examine the character of the German doctor, Dr Lessing (played by Horst Buchholz) in the film. In his fascination with riddles, and positive response to Guido, he initially appears to be a fellow “playboy”; but in the camp scenes he is revealed to be a killjoy, in his total self-absorption, insensitivity to others and inability to adapt to change.

Benigni also adapts and inflects other devices of classic comedy to telling effect in this film. The sight gags of the silent comedies were often based on the disparity or disjunction between the clown’s perception of his situation and his actual situation. Buster Keaton blithely continues to behave normally, unaware that he is heading for a crash or collision or capture by the enemy, until the final calamitous moment. He thinks he is in a normal everyday situation; he is actually in a life-threatening predicament. Benigni utilizes a similar kind of disjunction, highlighting the disparity between Guido’s behaviour (life as normal) and his actual situation (life-threatening), but with a twist: for while the Keaton character is marked by inattention to or unawareness of his surrounding environment, Guido feigns inattention or unawareness, in an effort to sustain the spirits of his son.

Another classic comedy ploy brilliantly adapted by Benigni is the solution gag. This type of gag involves an ingenious, unexpected and triumphant re-deployment of an object designed for another (even contrary) purpose. At the height of an action sequence, when disaster seems inevitable, the silent comedian would seize upon some unlikely object and use it as the tool of his deliverance, by means of an unexpected, economical and effective re-conceptualization of the situation. In Life is Beautiful, Guido deploys his uncle’s horse, daubed in anti-semitic graffiti, as the agent of deliverance: he thereby saves his “principessa”, at the eleventh hour, from a loveless marriage to a pompous fascist official, and gains her for himself. The horse has been re-configured, re-conceptualized, in a neat reversal, from a symbol of oppression to an agent of liberation; and Guido, by this ingenious action, has converted himself from passive victim to active hero (in playful parody of the fairytale white knight carrying off the helpless princess on his white charger).

I hope to have demonstrated that Benigni’s re-working of comic traditions and devices is by no means simple – or simply fun and games. Unfortunately, the killjoy is alive and well in our culture – and in our community. A certain stolid literalness, a failure to perceive ironies and multiple levels of meaning, let alone to appreciate playfulness, prevails. This is evident even in the response to the title of the film. Echoing Adorno and Steiner, Robert Manne in the Melbourne Age (15 February 1999) asserts the impossibility of perceiving life as beautiful after the horrors of Auschwitz. This attitude flies in the face of Jewish tradition itself, according to which life is beautiful, precious, a high value. We craft the Hebrew letters denoting life (Chai) into proud emblems of identity, to be worn on our bodies; we give donations to Jewish institutions in multiples of 18, the numerological equivalent of the letters Chet (8) plus Yod (10), which together spell Chai (life). We celebrate the survival of our people in defiance of all the historical attempts to annihilate us in the song “Am Yisroel Chai”. We do believe that life is valuable and beautiful, and that intense suffering or intimations of mortality only supply that insight with a stronger poignancy and pathos, with a deeper appreciation of life.

But the film also allows the title to be read ironically. Like Voltaire’s Candide, Guido appears to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, despite the pile up of disasters all around him. However, the author Voltaire and the director/screenwriter Benigni know that we don’t. They show us that their principal character is deluded, or attempting to delude; that there is a wide discrepancy, an abyss, between the optimistic pronouncements of their hero and the dismal reality of the world around them, which is full of oppression and unhappiness. Unlike Candide, Guido is shown to be aware of the reality while maintaining the fairytale fiction of optimism, for the sake of his son; to enable his son’s survival, if not his own.

The under-cutting, the puncturing of the fairytale romantic fiction occurs throughout the film, right from its very beginning. The comic adventures of the first half are punctuated by evidence of the ominous signs of rising anti-semitism in Fascist Italy. Guido’s uncle is mugged, his property desecrated; Jewish shops are daubed with anti-semitic slogans; the schools teach racist ideology. Guido impersonates a visiting school inspector with a parodic demonstration of Roman race superiority theory. (If this scene is not as biting and edgy as the scene in Europa Europa [1990], where the Jewish hero is used to exemplify Aryan racial features, or the scene in Cabaret [1972] where Hitlerjugend boys sing “Tomorrow belongs to me”, we have to remember the setting here is Italy, where anti-semitism was a late addition to fascism, rather than Germany, where fascism was founded on anti-semitism, and inextricable from it.) In the camp scenes, Guido’s disavowals of the real atrocities going on and his maintenance of the fictional game are constantly offset by the audience’s knowledge of the truth (remember that the clown character, the homo ludens, shares a conspiratorial relationship, a complicity, with his audience) of the rumours the child has heard, through assumed general knowledge among contemporary audiences and a few brief, understated but suggestive, visualizations of horror.

The “happy ending” of the film is also undercut. On one hand, the boy survives and is re-united with his mother, and he wins the game that his father taught him to play (the promised tank prize arrives). But the adult boy’s voice-over with hindsight points to the absence at the heart of the victory, the sacrifice that enabled his survival, the terrible loss of life that preceded the defeat of fascism. For a happy ending, it is a very sad one.

Benigni is not a Jew but his father was a victim of fascism, who survived the war but was scarred by it. He could only convey his traumatic experiences to his children through the use of humour. Clearly, this film is in part Benigni’s homage to his father, and his father’s generation, who one way or another endured the era of fascism, which their sons were spared. In the final voice-over he is the surviving son, rather than the playful, caring, dead father, whom he had been impersonating. Colin MacCabe, in a review of the film in the February 1999 British film journal, Sight & Sound, notes:

..The film’s strength is its settled faith that the affective bonds of the family can overcome the worst that society can offer. If this is a fantasy, it is probably a compensation we need when facing the reality of history. It is not too fanciful to read in this fantasy of a father’s protectiveness the real guilt of a generation of European children who grew up knowing they had been unable to save their own fathers.

For the literalists, certainly, there are implausibilities in this film. The film’s Auschwitz is far from the historical Auschwitz. In the real Auschwitz, Guido would never have got away with Chaplinesque parody of Nazi speech; would not have managed to capture the PA system to broadcast a message to his wife; nor would there have been Offenbach recordings in the Nazi mess quarters (as works of Jewish composers were taboo). Furthermore, Auschwitz was liberated by the Russian army, not the Americans. But, as the Italian Jewish history experts who vetted the script recognized, the historical inaccuracies are excusable in the light of the emotional truth and power of the film. It demonstrates the sustaining character of family bonds in conditions of extremis, attested to in testimonies of child survivors of the Holocaust. (For evidence of this, amongst others, see Eva Slonim’s testimony of the sustaining character of her father’s parting words, and of the co-presence of her sister in Auschwitz, in Paul Valent’s book, Child Survivors).

Another apparent implausibility is the absence in the film of a wider community for Guido. He has an uncle, a wife and a son, but no other extended family, no wider community – of fellow Jews or resistance fighters – who are present in most other films about the period. The film concentrates on the primal unit of the nuclear family, and its affective bonds..

Perhaps as a final riposte to Hitler, Benigni fires his deadliest satirical salvos at the Germans – and not just the Nazis. The German intellectual, represented by Dr Lessing (Horst Buchholz), is obsessed with useless riddles, puerile puzzles, at the expense of everything else – even in the midst of Auschwitz. The German philosopher Schopenhauer is the source of gags and jokes in the first half; though the theory attributed to him, that one can change reality merely by willing it, is treated light-heartedly as an aid to romance, there is clearly an underlying swipe at idealist German philosophy and its connection to Nazism (from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation via Nietzsche to Riefenstahl’s 1934 film Triumph of the Will). Turning German race theory on its head, it is the German race who are found wanting in this film – their principal sins being lack of humanity and no sense of humour. They are condemned as killers and killjoys.

References:
Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Paul Valent, Child Survivors: Adults Living with Childhood Trauma (Melbourne: William Heinemann, Australia, 1994).