Camping Out: Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful”

Kurt Jacobsen

[from New Politics, vol. 7, no. 3 (new series), whole no. 27, Summer 1999]

KURT JACOBSEN is a research associate in political science at the University of Chicago and reviews films for the London Guardian.

IN THE LATE 80S, FOR A CHICAGO WEEKLY, I reviewed Elim Klimov’s Come and See, a superb Soviet war film depicting the partisan struggle in the blood bath of the Eastern Front. A cavalcade of Goyaesque horrors climaxes with a sequence of gloating SS troops “ethnically cleansing” a Byelorussian village — with extreme prejudice. When a survivor of that onslaught contacted me later, I asked her if the screened brutality was at all exaggerated or if the Nazis were caricatured, as another Chicago movie critic, to my amazement, had suggested. No, she answered, scenes of villagers being tortured, butchered, and finally burnt alive inside a church, if anything, had understated the unspeakable acts she had witnessed (and narrowly escaped) as a little girl. Nazis were not just “mean guys who yell a lot” by any stretch, or lack, of even a child’s imagination.

Mass market films about the holocaust are curious but canny creatures in which essential elements of the excruciating experience must always be sacrificed for the sake of sustaining entertainment. Scripts undergo “commercial cleansings” to appease their fretful producers’ fallible sense of what audiences are willing to pay to see — and tragedy of any kind just isn’t boffo box office. Film makers, if they want to go on working, observe tacit but extremely rigid narrative rules: celebrate a hero who strikes back at tormentors even if only by spitting in their onion soup or by manufacturing dud munitions, stir in a tempestuous love story, draw a neat line between good and bad guys, and concoct a poignant or upbeat ending.

[pullquote] Check how Bourgie you are. If you love Begnini, or your heart melted with Life Is Beautiful, start worrying. [/pullquote]

Audiences must see themselves as part of the solution, not the problem. So one is quite content with the unreflective applause of realtors who move “riff-raff” out of gentrifying neighborhoods, bankers who red line, and business men who downsize to the detriment of everyone and everything but the bulging size of their wallets. To his credit Steven Spielberg, after consecrating Schindler as a proto-yuppie hero and assuring us that only Germans ever behave like Nazis, gave us gut-wrenching glimpses of cold-blooded atrocities managed by something akin to real Nazis: venal, corrupt, banal and only zealously inhuman toward those dregs officially deemed ‘life unworthy of life.’ Appallingly ordinary people. Indeed, ordinary law-abiding people (or enough of them), as the holocaust amply demonstrated, are capable of anything that the law compels or allows. The SS just happened to speak German. This is a striking caveat that artists like Benigni can help us to bear soberly in mind. Of course, he doesn’t. What does he want us to bear in mind?

Six dead is a crying shame, goes the sardonic lament; six or eleven million dead is arithmetic. Do atrocities of the latter magnitude permit a comedic treatment if it allows a harrowing message (pace, Western Union) to strike home? In principle, why not? Catch-22 arguably told us as much of value about warfare as did All Quiet on the Western Front. Sugaring the pill is excusable if the pill serves its bitterer purpose. In Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful critics and audiences beheld Samuel Johnson’s dog not only dancing but doing a bit of ballet, and with such good intentions. The supreme soviet of sentimentality, formally known as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, responded with a gush by awarding Benigni, this ebullient bully of bonhomie, Oscars for a best foreign picture and best actor. Has Benigni prat-fallen his way past our callous defenses to insinuate a valuable searing lesson we otherwise would not get? Does his premeditated brand of audacity excuse the otherwise insane intrusion of comedy into the environs of the camps? Night and fog and chuckles too.

Unprecedented, Benigni is not — even in Italy. Comedy and concentration camps blended there on another notable occasion. In the 1970s Bruno Bettelheim, unjustly disparaged after his death, took Lina Wertmuller’s Seven Beauties severely to task for its flip and, he feared, dangerously misleading view of camp survivors, and what it took to be one. What perturbed Bettelheim was not the director’s intent — which he could not presume to pinpoint anyway — but how enraptured and deluded audiences were by this raucous and dazzling work. (Wertmuller recently told me that, although she felt he misunderstood her intent, she agreed with many of his trenchant comments.) Indeed, Bettelheim at the time got it mostly right as to how movie audiences perceived the demented moral: “survival is all — it does not matter how, why, what for” — a lesson Bettelheim condemned for distorting camp realities and for pandering to a cheap cynicism. The most urbane cynicism, unfortunately, posed no barrier to any societal stirrings or inklings of a replay of Nazi-like conduct and crimes. Good intentions, even for a gifted artist, are not enough.

Enough about Wertmuller. What’s not to like about Benigni? Apart from a grotesque misrepresentation of the camps? Apart from a smug underlying message that a little guile and a lot of pluck enabled survival.(Bettelheim, Rousset, and Levi have news for you: it didn’t.) Apart from the unnoticed presence of a child in the men’s barracks? Apart from the absence of kapos? Apart from every inmate speaking Italian? One can go on and on. But are these opportunistic violations — not just suspensions — of reality justified by the film’s impact not only as “pure” cinema but as a humanistic work? After all, Benigni could have picked less well-documented plights, or else a patently imaginary one. Benigni is so impressively, or oppressively, charming that one feels kind of churlish pointing out that the prince-inmate is wearing a freshly laundered striped tunic.

IN AN OPENING SCENE AT A PICTURE POSTCARD FARM the skinny, raggedy, cunning clown Guido first literally catches a classy signorina, and then her eye — gallantly sucking a wasp stinger from her trembling thigh. Our self-declared prince of the province spins a medley of often serendipitous tricks to woo this cool and rather uppercrust young lady. Next stop is Guido’s uncle who dwells in a vast ramshackle beauty of a house (“Nothing is more necessary than the unnecessary”) strewn with enchanting antiques, a nag named Robin Hood and, by the looks of it, a few million bucks worth of paintings. Guido moves in and, while courting the lady and awaiting official permission to start a bookstore, takes a lowly waiter’s job in a plush hotel where we find he can crack any riddle quicker than a lobster’s claw. A German doctor enjoys, if that is quite the verb for his deadly earnest delight, spinning riddles with the waiter — an amiable duel of wits which sets up an ugly realization much later in the camps of how profoundly banal evil men can be.

A plethora of implausibilities pile up, setting the half-lyrical, half-daffy tone. A heady mix of alternating inanities and dramatic shocks unfolds. Benigni invents a Marx Brothers Mediterranean universe where, without any serious reprisal, he drops flower pots on bumptious bureaucrats, steals hats (and an automobile), impersonates a pompous school inspector who instructs a classroom in the joys of possessing a racially superior belly button, and gallops aboard a green horse around a posh hotel ballroom filled with swaggering admirers of Mussolini, grabs a girl and gets away unmolested. You gotta like this guy even if you can’t believe him. His successful antics evidently are all jokingly owed to will power and Schopenhauer.

“Ingenuity uber alles” is Benigni’s keynote. Into this occasionally tedious frivolity he drops somber notes and disquieting scenes: none more so than a blithe dinner table conversation among enthused fascisti about a children’s math book problem posed in terms of how much money the liquidation of 300,000 cripples will save the state — for 300,000 patients were killed by the Reich in a warm-up for the final solution. The diners chatter brightly about arithmetic, not the gruesome reality. The German doctor will be anally absorbed in abstractions, not the plight of human beings. The film is nearly redemptive despite the unlikelihood of a rich girl marrying Guido, once a poor waiter and now a poor book seller (How did he get permission from her former boy friend, a local official, to start the shop anyway?)

CUT TO SEPTEMBER 1943 OR THEREABOUTS when Germany occupied Italy and tried to pry loose its Jews — murdering about one in ten. Nazi troops strut nearby. Anti-semitic epithets are smeared on the book shop and Guido dutifully misinforms his son that the scrawling refers to something silly, like “spiders and Visigoths.” It seems far from clear, though, that being deceived is any better for five-year-old boys than it is for 25-year-old men and women. Is this really something to admire? Father and son are carted off to the camps anyway; momma insistently joins them with help from an obliging SS officer. They are, I swear, actually helped aboard the train by the Nazi guards — or get, at worst, an impatient shove.

In camp barracks, where the son wouldn’t have lasted five seconds, Guido’s hilarious mistranslation of the Nazi’s instructions would have gotten his skull bashed in not by the Nazis, but by fellow prisoners whose own lives would have been that much more endangered. There is a double deceit or delusion going on: Guido of the child and then of the filmmaker regarding the audience. For poignancy to arrive, reality has to go. The loudspeaker and use of the station would have gotten him and child instantly killed, but he gets away. Guido can grandstand for his son and the actor grandstand for his audience who will not be much pushed by the distance between the “mean guys who yell a lot” and the staggering routine callousness and brutality of a precisely gauged and totally monitored hell.

Not that this camp isn’t grim. The prisoners are disgruntled, they are scruffy, they are pretty depressed about it all. Everybody speaks Italian instead of the babel of tongues that aided the “divide and conquer” system. They tote heavy anvils all day long. But reality intrudes most

rudely in the women’s barracks, where with the blithest and blithering inconsistency, momma learns that “children and old women” are selected for death. Why hasn’t the men’s barracks gotten word? Guido’s Uncle meanwhile is led with a shrug off to death. The mother happens on the gray gruesome mound of entangled corpses. There is a child’s kitten crawling over discarded clothing, which is Benigni’s answer to Spielberg’s scarlet-coated girl in the ghetto clearance sequence in Schindler’s List. But Benigni’s most brilliant moment is when Guido dissuades his son regarding wild rumors of extermination: “Who would turn people into buttons and soap? That’ll be the day. Preposterous!”

The prisoners are remarkably complicit in fooling the child that this is all a game to win a thousand points and win a real tank. As American troops near the camp, and liberation beckons, Guido ultimately is killed in the frantic course of saving his family. He clearly would have survived had he not had a wife to save; his fate, unlike that of any actual inmate, was in his hands. The denouement bring the son a tank, liberty and mother again. Guido bluffed the kid and us, the audience. It’s a pity that for the film to work that the camp must become an outrageous lie.

AGONY IS KEPT MOSTLY OFF-SCREEN on the belated and, I thought, offensive ploy that this really all was a child’s eye view (“This is my story”). No wonder the Academy loved it: a Walt Disnified concentration camp, love melting the class divide, a Chaplin-ish figure tweaking authority — as if tweaking made any difference. To boot, it masquerades as a true story (like Europa, Europa), a story full of weird miracles where the naive and innocent triumph. (One thinks instead of the Yad Vashem memorial of glittering mirrors and candles commemorating the children killed.) The filmmaker simply counted on substituting this sentimentality for deeper and more disturbing lessons about camps. It is tempting to walk away knowing love conquers all, and that moxie alone will see you through. If it worked for Benigni’s hero, why didn’t more survive? Did we really get a profound insight, or any insight at all, into these systemic murder machines, into camps infernally designed to reduce you to what your captors think of you? Nope.

The real tribute to holocaust victims is depicting and facing their experiences honestly with an eye to preventing it ever happening again through developing, as it were, informed hearts. Shock value, audacity and nerviness carefully wrapped in certified good intentions is what the latter half of Life is Beautiful has to offer as a successful counterfeit. Benigni means well, but since when does meaning well obliterate other criteria — since when does the intent excuse the content? What audiences need to know is how ordinary men, not psychos and fanatics, carried out these deeds. But that appears to be one abiding riddle that Benigni is uninterested in posing, let alone solving.