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Perspective
Benignis film, like life itself, is beautiful
By PAMELA SCHAEFFER
It seemed for a time that Roberto
Benigni had got away with it. First Life is Beautiful, his comedy
about life set in a concentration camp was voted the favorite of film festival
audiences at Toronto and Vancouver, Canada, and Cannes, France. The film was
successful in Europe and, in the United States, boosted by mostly favorable
reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations, it set a box office record for a
foreign film. Finally, there were seven Oscar nominations, the most ever for a
foreign film, and those three Oscar awards that had Benigni all but levitating
on his way to the stage.
But then the predictable backlash came, against not only Benigni
but his films admiring audiences. David Denby, film critic for The New
Yorker, was so provoked by the films success that he wrote a rare
follow-up review. Life is Beautiful was successful, he said,
because we are ready to put the Holocaust behind us. Exhausted, we dont
want to think about it anymore, so were grateful that Benigni has turned
it into comedy. The film, he admonished, is a benign form of Holocaust
denial.
Richard Alleva, writing in Commonweal, accused Benigni of
collapsing the greatest tragedy of our time into domestic
pathos.
The film is being compared unfavorably to the far more realistic
Schindlers List, whose maker, Steven Spielberg, was said to
be privately appalled by Benignis romance.
Some of these analyses raise provocative questions. Should an
event as horrible as the Holocaust serve as backdrop for a fable of any kind,
let alone a fable about the role of humor in resisting evil? Does a filmmaker
take inappropriate license when a film portrays the Holocaust inaccurately?
Benignis portrayal is criticized for its lack of realism throughout. In a
real concentration camp, such a romance would have been inconceivable. No
parent, however determined, could have carried off a game based on lies
intended to protect a young child from the horrors. In fact, no young child
could have escaped being gassed. The portrayal is facile, sanitized, prettied
up.
Its worth noting that these criticisms do not catch Benigni,
the films writer, director and star, off guard. When the idea for the
film occurred to him, he told interviewers, he considered it implausable. He
finally decided to go forward when the idea would not leave him alone. As a
sign of his good intentions, his first screening was for a group of Holocaust
survivors.
Which brings me to my defense of this film.
This is a film that resonates on several levels not from a need to
deny evil, though that is a natural enough wish, but out of a deeply human need
to believe it is possible, on some level, to triumph over it.
Shimon Samuels, European director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
whose purpose is Holocaust remembrance, suggested that humor is a form of
resistance. To have kept any state of humor in the concentration camps
was in itself an act of resistance, he told Christopher Goodwin of the
London Times. We in the Wiesenthal Center want to see humor very
much as part of the armor, combating prejudice. Samuels said that, while
he understood that Life is Beautiful is unrealistic in its
portrayal of the Holocaust, it is an allegory that is beautifully
made. The center, he said, had absolutely no objection to backing
it and saying it is another means of presenting a different dimension to the
Holocaust.
On another level, Begnini speaks to a fierce instinctual maternal
and paternal determination to protect the children in our care -- a desire that
Mary Gordon treats memorably in her novel Men and Angels and one that
many parents and grandparents easily relate to. This doesnt mean lying to
children to keep them from painful truths, as one of the silliest of
Benignis critics suggests he advocates in this film, but it does mean
recognizing how vulnerable children can be to fear, pain, loss and despair. A
professor in Belgrade, interviewed on National Public Radio amid the recent
NATO bombings of that city, noted that, in an unintended real-life sequel to
Life Is Beautiful, people in Belgrade were inventing games to help
children deal with the need to take shelter when the air raid sirens blast.
Meanwhile, be assured that the refugees flooding over the Serbian
border have invented their own ways to soften their childrens pain.
Those of us who have not flinched from learning all we can about
the Holocaust know that amid its matchless horrors, the human spirit triumphed
then in ways large and small, as it is undoubtedly triumphing this week among
the Kosovar refugees. Schindlers List, for all its realism,
was about such a triumph: a German businessman who saved more than a thousand
Jewish lives. According to the Talmudic inscription on the ring the survivors
gave him, Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.
Life is Beautiful comes with a quote too. The title is
a legacy of Leon Trotsky, who couldnt help thinking that life is
beautiful even as he waited for Stalins assassins to kill him.
Life is Beautiful is a fable about hope, about keeping
hope alive. It offers another window for looking back at the Holocaust, for
imagining the courage it must have taken to survive, even if we cannot imagine
the pain. If it werent for such windows, we could never look back, never
risk remembering, never wonder how we, if confronted with such evil, might
respond. We would all become perpetrators of Holocaust denial, and not of the
benign sort.
Pamela Schaeffer is NCR special projects editor.
National Catholic Reporter, April 16,
1999
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