The hit of the last Cannes Film Festival, Life Is Beautiful was reportedly hailed at the official premiere with a ten-minute standing ovation.  One reason is that any film in which the creator hits for the cinematic cycle deserves at least ten minutes: Italian comedian Roberto Benigni wrote, directed, Starred and cast his wife in the female lead in the film.  A master of physical comedy, Benigni has been called "Italy's Chaplin," and he brings the same sense of timing and charm to his verbal comedy -- though in this case the dialog is in Italian. Thus, his previous best chance for exposure in the US was 1993's quickly-forgotten Son of the Pink Panther, which nevertheless showcased a style chipped off the old block (i.e. Peter Sellers), but leavened with humility, contra Sellers' pomposity.  Art house patrons already know Benigni takes his comedy to the edge: Johnny Stecchino (1991) features a bus driver who is taken for a mobster, and The Monster is a farce set within the context of serial killings.  But I'm not so sure those who applauded so hard for Benigni's Life is Beautiful will find that precise sort of magical quality in those earlier outings.  It's not that the Italian Chaplin has been making films of such power and beauty all along.  More likely, a very special sort of magic indeed happened when his trademark method of comic treatment of dark subjects inevitably hit upon the subject of the Holocaust.

Of course, the horrors of Nazism and the Second World War are far in the background for the first half of Life Is Beautiful -- so much so, that viewers are likely to be lulled into thinking this is a very different sort of movie than it turns out to be. Still, most people in the audience understand the significance of opening a story set in Europe in the summer of 1939, the last possible moments for those quaint little villages were devastated and changed forever not just by ordinary war, but by genocide.

It is this moment of history when a gentle Italian Jew named Guido (Benigni) and his friend Ferrucio arrive in Arrezzo, a small town in Tuscan Italy.  When Guido is unable to open the bookstore of his dreams, he takes a job as a waiter and woos a local schoolteacher, Dora, the woman of his dreams.  This wooing is the sweet through-line of the first part of the film and, combined with the Old World setting and some fanciful art direction, we find ourselves lost in an almost fairy tale world.

We have already been warned, however, by an unidentified narrator who compares this story to a fable, in which there is both "wonder and happiness" but also sadness.  Behind the events of romance and marriage and the birth of Guido and Dora's son, Joshua, the darkness in the background builds and soon engulfs the foreground.  At first we hardly see what is happening, since Benigni folds the shadow of war and even anti-Semitism into a Chaplinesque slapstick.  The film opens with a Keystone Cop-like chase scene that comically underscores the Italian people's easy subservience to authoritarian power.  Later, when Guido is trying to get a permit for his bookstore, he asks a local official about his politics -- but the official can't hear him until he quiets down his two rambunctious sons, little Adolpho and little Benito. And in a scene that will forever be spoken of in the same breath of Chaplin's The Little Dictator, Guido -- posing as an inspector from Rome come to brief the school on the government's new racial policies -- delivers a hilarious speech about his own Aryan superiority.  Focussing on the superiority of his ear lobes and bellybutton, he also exposes such racist ideology for the ridiculous nonsense it is, even as it remains no laughing matter.

Indeed, as Europe descends into the Nazi Hell, Benigni the clown resolutely follows -- seemingly daring himself as to how far he can take his jokes.  And he takes them to places where no Holocaust movie has gone before.  During a conversation over dinner, an Italian supporter of racist policies notes how much the elimination of the weak, crippled and epileptics would save the government.  But he gets the math wrong, and a silly argument ensues.  And when Nazi thugs wreck his Uncle's shop and soak his horse in paint, Guido gallops on the green horse as a knight to rescue his lovely "Princess" from engagement to a Fascist lackey.

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade.  But what if life gives you Nazis?  Employing humor in a Holocaust film clearly took a certain amount of chutzpa, and maybe what it really took was a certain amount of goyim.  "Satire is great," says Woody Allen, "but for Nazis you use baseball bats and broken bottles." Indeed, Jewish artists have understandably curbed their traditional humor whenever they get near this subject.  (With some notable exceptions, as when Mel Brooks made "Springtime For Hitler" the musical centerpiece for his film The Producers.)

A reluctance to inject too much humor into stories about people ground up by the Nazi meatgrinder may, paradoxically, have helped shield audiences from experiencing the horrors of the Holocaust at an even deeper level.  Schindler's List, for all that film's cinematic virtuosity, did not seem to me as successful in making what can unfortunately become just "a stereotypical genocide victim" (welcome to the Twentieth Century) into unique human individuals as does Life Is Beautiful.  The reluctance to use humor, even liberally, means withholding a key element which makes characters human, and allows us to identify with them.  At the same time, humor has the effect on an audience of forcing them to lower their guard: the viewer is less able to steel himself in advance against the horrors he knows are coming.

In this case, we are prevented from protecting ourselves from what we know is coming because Guido is so good at protecting his son, Joshua, from what is there.  "What organization!" says Guido -- admiringly! -- about the Nazi guards herding him and his son onto a train.  When Joshua asks if there are going to be seats, Guido replies, with mock indignation, "Whoever heard of seats on a train."  When the guards select out old people from the line of Jews moving into the concentration camp and Joshua asks where they are going, Guido says, "They're going to be on a different team."  Indeed, everything from here on out is respun by Guido as a game.  The players (that is, the prisoners) get points for doing certain things, and points are taken away for various reasons.  And whoever has the most points at the end, explains Guido, wins the grand prize: not just a toy tank, like the one Joshua plays with earlier in the film, but a real one.

And thus the comedy set up in first half of the film is carried into the camps, right to the door of the gas chambers.   But Begnini knows just where the line is: there are no jokes inside those satanic walls, for there could be none.  And yet here again Begnini pushes the envelope, this time in a very different direction.  A dignified elderly man expresses concern for a female German guard as she momentarily stumbles, even as he is hanging up his clothes preparatory to taking a "shower".  For a moment a flicker of humanity appears on her face and we feel like the survivor who saw Eichmann in Jerusalem, dumbfounded to realize this is not a monster after all, but a human being.

One of the reviews of this film which reminded us that Roberto Benigni was "Italy's Chaplin" also noted that the comedian had a little Woody Allen in him as well.  Which is one of the more shallow observations I've ever read in a film review.  For clearly, any similarity between the two comedians is that Woody Allen also has a little Chaplin in him.  Apart from this, these two funny men could not be more different on some key issues.

We've already touched on the fact that the (albeit atheistic) Jewish person, Woody Allen, would not have made a satirical film about Nazis.  However, the more important difference between these two comedians is not that Woody Allen is Jewish and more sensitive to the issues at hand, but because Woody Allen simply couldn't possibly make a film with a title like Life Is Beautiful -- not unless it was understood that the sentiment expressed in such a title was part of the joke.  Woody Allen is the guy whose belief about "Life" is that "Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable," and that the crossroads humankind faces leads in one direction to "despair and utter hopelessness," and in the other, "total extinction."  And this is our most famous Jewish comedian -- one who subverts his culture's comic tradition by, instead of creating a moral context for suffering, making our need for such a context a sick joke.  The punchline to the joke about humankind facing two equally bleak paths is "Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly."  The ultimate joke, then, is humankind itself, and the cosmic pomposity and absurdity of our insisting on meaning in a cruel and meaningless cosmos.

The Holocaust itself, for many, including many Jews, seems the final exposure of humanity's vain belief in human greatness. Indeed, how can anybody, after the Holocaust, endorse the conclusion that "life is beautiful"?  Now that we realize all too clearly what "life" may include, it seems that not only can "life" never be beautiful again, but that it was never really beautiful to begin with.  On the contrary.  "Life," concludes Woody Allen, in one of his most-quoted lines, "is a concentration camp.  You're stuck here and there's no way out and you can only rage impotently against your persecutors."  In other words, the camp depicted in Life Is Beautiful is a metaphor for life itself.

Begnini's film has been criticized by some critics who claim that it shields the audience from the true horror of the Holocaust by making the entire experience into a game.  But those who share Woody Allen's pessimistic point of view would say that the film shields us not just from the horror of the Holocaust, but from the general tragedy that is human existence.  It doesn't spoil the ending of Begnini's film to reveal that it ends on a hopeful note; surely that is a main part of its appeal and popularity. But if one takes the view that life is not beautiful, but is rather a concentration camp, then any such hopeful endings are right up there with the pleasant lies Guido tells his son: cheerful illusions that help us endure, but nothing more.

Is it possible that even Roberto Begnini understood this?  Can the real message of this film be that we should, as Guido does in one of the movie's running gags, use "mind control" to convince ourselves "life is beautiful" -- even when it is objectively not?

 As I was discussing the film with someone else who'd seen it, I was astonished at my friend's observation that the entire story revolves around a constant stream of lies told by a father to his son.  I guess I hadn't thought of it that way, I confessed.  But I started to.  And I realized that if we want to bring moral judgments to the theater, we're going to have to get around to the issue of truth-telling in a situation where the truth hurts.

And to tell the truth, when it comes to Nazis, I fall rather quickly back on a notion of "ethical hierarchy" -- that is, the idea that some moral rules are naturally higher than others.  In other words, the answer to the ethical puzzle "Would you lie to a Nazi to save a Jew?" would be yes, for me, I hope with all my heart.  And to the question, "Would you lie to your child if a lie might prevent that child from experiencing the full horrors of a death camp?" my answer would be, "In a heartbeat."

But if I told the same sort of lies to my child in the same situation in which Guido told lies to his, would they be lies?

The job description for being a parent includes acting as a protector and mediator between one's child and the world.  It's hard enough when the world comes into your house via television; it would seem impossible when you are thrust into the place most of us would agree is the worst possible one a child could be. And yet the duties of protection and mediation would not cease.

My circumstances are rather different than Guido’s; perhaps I don't lie to my child, but I certainly don't get into her face when she's playing paper dolls on the floor and tell her she lives in a world where some people have actually gassed other people to death and then pried out their teeth to get the gold. On the contrary.  As far as my daughter knows, she lives in a world where "everything is going to be alright."  A world where the good guys eventually win, and where the dragons eventually get slain.  Note that I do not seek to preserve her from all knowledge of bad guys or dragons; my desire is that she understands that no matter how bleak things may look, there is a moral order in the universe which will ultimately prevail.

And apparently I'm not alone in my instinct for doing this. Sociologist Peter Berger has written about those "prototypical human gestures," and tried to understand what they tell us about man and the universe.  Among these prototypical human gestures, perhaps the most fundamental, says Berger, is the parental reassurance to a child that "everything's gonna be alright."  And not just this particular problem or that particular worry, but everything.  And if the child psychologists are right, this experience is absolutely essential to becoming a healthy human being.  It is at the core of who we are, this "experience of trust in the order of reality."  And yet, if Woody Allen is right, and death is the end, and meaning is a fabrication, than the parental assurance that "everything's gonna be alright" is a lie -- a loving lie, but a lie just the same.  For everything is clearly NOT all right, and life is NOT beautiful.  The world that the child is being encouraged to trust, says Berger, is the same world in which he or she will die, the world in which the child's parents will die, and perhaps -- as we have seen in the context of this discussion -- in most horrible fashion.  Mother love would not stop being love, but it would take on a tragic quality.

Berger sees our faith (not to mention psychological need) in an objective order in the universe as a "signal of transcendence," empirical evidence in the heart of man that points to an ultimate reality, a transcendent reality, a rock solid proof that life is, objectively, beautiful.  Interestingly enough, Life Is Beautiful has examples of several more of these "signals of transcendence," identified by Berger in his 1969 book, A Rumor of Angels.

Along with "the argument from hope" and "the argument of ordering" which we see embodied in parental reassurance, Berger speaks of "the argument from damnation" --  the intuition that certain acts demand "a curse of supernatural dimensions" (65). He sites as an image of all of these "signals of transcendence" a photograph of a Nazi execution -- which show "a woman holding a child, supporting it with one hand and with the other pressing its face into her shoulder, and a few feet away a German soldier with raised rifle, taking aim..." (60)  We get very nearly the same image in Life Is Beautiful: as Guido cradles the sleeping Joshua in his arms, he gets lost in a fog settled over the camp, and wanders into a pile of dead and mangled bodies -- again, in a single image, a representation of the best and worst of humanity.

The last two "signals of transcendence" identified by Berger which apply here are first, what the sociologist calls, "the argument from play," and, indeed, in this film play becomes the vehicle of salvation, for both Joshua and the childlike Guido. And finally, there is "argument from humor": the comic is apprehension of a fundamental discrepancy -- an obvious example is the marvelous scene where Guido volunteers his services as a translator to a German guard delivering the terrible rules of camp life.  Guido's hilarious "translation" offers an example both of the humor in simple incongruity, but also points up the incongruity of the human condition itself -- our pretences at power, our "imprisonment" in a cosmos at odds with our longings, but -- contra Woody Allen -- an intimation of possible escape.

What does it mean to protect or "preserve innocence"?  What exactly is involved in "a child's point of view"?  Is it simply a matter of "ignorance is bliss?"  Or is there some fundamental way of looking at the universe characteristic of a child that is actually the correct one, a kind of knowledge we lose as we become adults which makes, not for bliss, but the opposite?

To say "Life Is Beautiful" is to invoke that peculiar flavor of aesthetics which so often finds its way into moral judgments. is to pronounce that Creation (despite the Fall) is "good", with the finality of Divine Judgement.  Indeed, for life to be "beautiful" in an objective sort of way, and not just my subjective opinion or our collective delusion, there must be a objective "beholder" who holds this opinion in His eye.  And s long as that is the case, we can confidently proclaim that "life is beautiful," objectively so, even at the foot of a mountain mangled bodies.  Even in the gas chambers, man is significant, good and meaning prevail: there are bad guys, yes, and they are often profoundly bad.  But the good guys will win; the ending will be happy.  The story is not a tragedy, but a Divine Comedy.

Peter Berger's citation of Enid Welsford's history of the clown is most applicable here: "To those who do not repudiate the religious insight of the race, the human spirit is uneasy in t world because it is at home elsewhere, and escape from the prison house is possible not only in fancy but in fact.  The theist believes in possible beatitude, because he disbelieves in the dignified isolation of humanity.  To him, therefore, romantic comedy is serious literature because it is a foretaste of the truth: the Fool is wiser than the Humanist; and clownage is less frivolous than the deification of humanity."  (72)

Roberto Begnini's combination of a wise Fool and Nazi “Supermen” is not about comforting lies, but about but about the painful and beautiful truth.

The Czechoslavakian film, The Shop On Main Street, winner of the 1965 Best Foreign Language Oscar, strikes many of the same notes as Life Is Beautiful . Here, ne'er do well handyman Tono Britko is given an expropriated button shop owned by a nearly deaf Jewish widow, Mrs. Lautmann -- whom the gentle, henpecked Tono hasn't the heart to evict. After his conscience is awakened by Mrs. Lautmann's neighborhood protectors, Tono is drawn into a charade that has the widow treating him as long lost son, and the carpenter's shrewish and ambitious wife thinking her husband is finally getting somewhere in the world. Josef Kroner as Tono is as conscientiously Chaplain-esque as Benigni, especially in a scene where he mistakenly keeps returning salutes meant for his collaborator brother-in-law as they walk through the town. Unlike Benigni's character, however, Tono eventually runs out of deceptions, energy and nerve -- indeed, of the belief that "life is beautiful" -- and the film ends on a very different note than Benigni's. The slight mythification of the enemy (ala The Little Dictator, complete with faux swaztikas) takes nothing from the effect, and in fact reminds us that scapegoating blame for the Nazi genocide onto a single people can be a way of avoiding responsibility. Indeed, this film can be read as an agonizing confession of Czech complicity in the Holocaust.