Roberto Benigni plays the starry-eyed Italian-Jew Guido in pre-World War II Italy. He’s a romantic, an optimist, a jokester and a troublemaker just on the right side of acceptability. He falls madly in love with an Italian woman named Dora who literally falls into his arms, and the first half of the film is dedicated to his comical and endearing pursuit of her heart. But it’s not just the love story itself that works its charms on the viewer, its Benigni’s love letter to the screwball comedy of Hollywood’s golden age that is a welcome surprise. There are ridiculous sight gags, absurd hijinks and impossible coincidences; and many of them are laugh-out-loud funny.
However, at the same time Benigni is disarming you with humor and sweetness, the context of the story is steadily shifting. Nazi ideology is steadily overtaking Italy; and so is Nazi occupation. Jews are being identified, discriminated against, and finally being herded onto trains. Guido has married Dora and they has have a young son Giosuè by the time the Nazis come for him. He and his half-Jewish son are swiftly taken; his full Italian wife is not. But in an unforgettably heroic measure of love and solidarity, Dora demands that the Nazis take her too. They oblige. Though she hopes to be reunited with her family, the concentration camp’s strict separation of the sexes makes that impossible.
Meanwhile, Guido tries his best to shield Giosuè from the truth of what’s happening. This is where the “Life Is Beautiful” movie simply enters into a thematic league of its own. Guido maintains a joyful front for his son and concocts an imaginary game that explains to Giosuè all the unusual and scary things happening around him. In the midst of unspeakable suffering and fear, Guido takes on more labor — a labor of love to preserve his young son’s innocence. Giosuè believes the game is real, wants to win, and finds reserves of energy necessary to his survival because of the exciting illusion Guido painstakingly maintains. The film’s climax is one of the most unforgettable images of love in action that has ever been created.
I was fifteen years old when I first saw the film in the theater with my dad. And when I revisited the film 24 years later, that indelible image was exactly as I remember it. No moment in any film I’ve seen since has made that kind of mark on me.
It’s almost a tragedy that star Roberto Benigni’s effervescent joy and gratitude upon winning Best Actor at the 1999 academy awards seems to have overshadowed the film itself in our cultural consciousness. Although witnessing such childlike enthusiasm and whimsy only serves to make the case that throwing Benigni in the lead might have been the greatest casting choice of all time. He simply is the character — gently placed into a different time and setting.