Release Year: 1997

Genre: Comedy, Drama, War

Director: Roberto Benigni

Writer: Vincenzo Cerami and Roberto Benigni

Stars: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini

Pack your lunches and get those permission slips signed, because we're going on a feel trip.

That's right. A feel trip.

As we travel through 1939 Italy, we're going to feel all the feels: love, hate, mirth, horror, hope, sadness, lust, disgust, surprise, passion, suffering, fear, and wonder. And those are just the ones we could say before we ran out of breath.

Our tour guide? None other than Roberto Benigno and his film Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella).

It's a slapstick comic Holocaust film, and, uh, did you think you'd ever see those three words in the same sentence? We can't think of another writer who'd dare to incorporate comedy into a story about such a horrific chapter in the history of the world. Well, except Charlie Chaplin. And Larry David.

Regardless, it's a risky juxtaposition.

The movie's tale opens with our Italian Jewish hero, Guido Orefice, using his quick wits and boundless charm to win the love of the beautiful Dora.

Years later, Guido's life takes a hard left when he and his family are rounded up by the Nazis and brought to a concentration camp. To protect his son, Joshua (Giosué in Italian), from the horrors of the camp, Guido pretends the situation is an elaborate game, relying again on his wits and charm—this time to save his son's innocence and life.

He also throws in a little Chaplin, too. Because who doesn't love Chaplin? (Well, other than Nazis, of course.)

Released in 1997, Life Is Beautiful earned a shelf-bending number awards and accolades for its writer, director, and star, Roberto Benigni. It won the Grand Prix at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Palme d'Or.

It also snagged seven nominations at the 71st Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It took home Best Actor, Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Original Dramatic Score. It lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love because—let's be honest—no one was beating Shakespeare at the Academy that year.

But Life Is Beautiful has its detractors (read: haters). Writing a film about the Holocaust is always a risk—doing it as a comedy is even riskier. Rob Gonsalves labeled it the "final frontier of schmaltz" and hoped viewers' tastes would "turn once more to honesty and reality" (source).

Even more damning were the critics who saw the film as mocking, if unintentionally, the suffering of Holocaust victims. In some cases, maybe even 75 years later is "too soon."

Let's hold off on judgment calls for now and see where this feel trip takes us.

While you're at it, hop down to Costco and pick up a Kleenex Ultra Facial Tissue 10-Pack. Chances are you'll need 'em.

A priest, a rabbi, and an atheist walk into a bar. The bartender looks up and says, "Sorry, obvious joke setups aren't welcome here." The rabbi asks, "Do you know some place we would be welcome?" The bartender points: "Yeah, across the road. Same place I sent the chicken."

Rimshot.

We open with an admittedly bad joke to broach the question: Are there places that jokes aren't welcome? More to the point: Are there subjects that one shouldn't joke about?

Over the years, many comedians have come under fire for telling jokes about subjects or incidents that other people consider sensitive and off-limits. At the same time, others have defended the idea that no subject should be off limits to comedy. Ricky Gervais, for one, argues that a subject should never be off limits so long as the joke is true, an intellectual pursuit, and, of course, funny (source).

Enter Life Is Beautiful, stage left.

While the film received many awards and a lot of praise, it also got a fair bit of censure for mixing gallows humor with an event as horrific as the Holocaust. We mentioned Tom Dawson's opinion above, but he's hardly alone.

Writing for Salon, Charles Taylor said the film was "in offensively poor taste" and criticized the "sheer callous inappropriateness of comedy existing within the physical reality of the camps—even the imagined reality of a movie" (source).

Others have argued the film's inclusion of comedy has merit. In his review, Roger Ebert wrote:

The film finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter. And Benigni isn't really making comedy out of the Holocaust, anyway. He is showing how Guido uses the only gift at his command to protect his son. If he had a gun, he would shoot at the Fascists. If he had an army, he would destroy them. He is a clown, and comedy is his weapon. (Source)

In Ebert's reading of the film, comedy is the weapon we use to defend ourselves against a harsh, uncaring reality. In Taylor's view, comedy takes the unimaginable suffering of others and callously steps over it for cheap chuckles.

How do we reconcile these two very different views? Well…we can't. You can only answer this question for yourself, and you might even find yourself on both sides of the issue depending on the joke in question.

What Life Is Beautiful does is provide a thoughtful, engaging film that allows us to ask these questions of comedy. And that's a perfectly good reason for why you should care about this film.

Also, it manages to do all this without resorting to a single chicken-crossing-the-road joke. Pretty impressive, right?