Comedy equals tragedy plus time — or so claims Alan Alda’s obnoxious producer character in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But it’s hard to imagine how humor could apply to the Holocaust no matter how much time passes.
Sure, Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” prompted belly laughs in 1969 by envisioning a stage musical called “Springtime for Hitler,” but the tastelessness was the joke as the characters conceived the most atrocious show imaginable. When a few years later Jerry Lewis wrote, directed and starred in a film about a clown in Nazi Germany, “The Day the Clown Cried,” it was deemed unreleasable.
So the prospect of Italian comedy actor-director Roberto Benigni setting a comedy partially in a Nazi death camp was met with considerable trepidation. The spindly Benigni is primarily known for playing bungling scamps in slapstick farces such as “Johnny Stecchino” and “The Monster (Il Mostro),” which confirmed him as a box-office superstar in his home country. His limited English-language exposure includes a scene-stealing turn in Jim Jarmusch’s “Down By Law” and a failed attempt to continue Inspector Clouseau’s legacy in Blake Edwards’ “Son of the Pink Panther.”
What kind of film would Benigni make about the Holocaust, “Bumbling Though Buchenwald”?
No, thank goodness. “Life Is Beautiful (La Vita E Bella)” isn’t strictly a comedy so much as a fable that carefully balances its comedic and tragic aspects. In the more farcelike first half, an aspiring Jewish bookseller Guido (Benigni) pokes fun at the local Fascists in his Tuscan village while falling in love with a teacher (Nicoletta Braschi, the actor’s wife).
The darker second half finds the couple and their 5-year-old son Giosue (Giorgio Cantarini) arrested and sent to a concentration camp near the end of the war. To shield Giosue from the surrounding horrors, Guido convinces him that the experience is just a big contest to win a tank.
“This was the point, to balance the tragedy and the comedy, because it could be dangerous, no?” the animated Benigni said last month after presenting his film at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I was scared about this project, but I fell in love, and when you love something, you follow.”
He needn’t have worried. When “Life Is Beautiful” debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it received a prolonged standing ovation and won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize, prompting Benigni to kiss the feet of head jurist Martin Scorsese on stage. Audiences also voted it the People’s Choice Award in Toronto, where critics placed it second (to “Happiness”) as the festival’s best.
Now Miramax Films is releasing “Life Is Beautiful” in the U.S. with hopes of repeating the box-office success of another Italian heartwarmer, “The Postman (Il Postino).” It arrives Friday in Chicago.
Benigni, his dark hair defying gravity as it arches back from his receding hairline and open impish face, said the movie is the result of two simultaneous impulses.
“First of all, I was thinking as a director, as a comedian, about a beautiful story. This is my duty, to think about something beautiful,” he said, noting that he and screenwriting collaborator Vincenzo Cerami talked about creating a love story.
Also, “I (wanted) very much to try to put my body in an extreme situation. As a comedian in Italy, I’m so well known as a comic strip, like Donald Duck. I (thought) very, very much about me as Benigni in a concentration camp, and this was discombobulating. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and to find out the way to put me in a concentration camp, because it’s also my contribution to the (memory of the) Holocaust. Then when I (thought of) the idea of the little boy, the love story, this for me was the most beautiful and most simple idea for a movie.”
Benigni’s longtime idol is Charlie Chaplin, whose 1940 Nazi-parodying “The Great Dictator” is an obvious influence on “Life Is Beautiful.” Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s writings also made an impact, and although Benigni is not Jewish (“I have not this honor, as Charlie Chaplin said”), part of the story’s inspiration came from close to home: His father was an Italian soldier sent to a German work camp by Nazis in 1943.
“When he came back, he was a skeleton, 35 kilos,” Benigni said. “All the friends he had had died, and he was obsessed by this period.”
The actor, who was born in 1952, said his father wanted to tell him and his three sisters about his experiences but was afraid of scaring them. “So one day he started to tell the story with levity,” Benigni recalled. “My mother said, `Oh, tell them when the captain in the mirror said some funny story,’ and he started to tell us smiling a little, telling some funny stories, and me and my sisters were imitating him, and when we started to laugh, to smile, he was finally free, like liberated. He stopped having nightmares.”
Benigni said his exchanges with his father shaped Guido and Giosue’s relationship. While writing, he also consulted with Milan’s Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, though he stressed, “This is a fable, this is a fiction, so I thought I must have my license as an artist to take my freedom.”
Not everyone appreciates those freedoms. A minority of critics have vilified the movie, complaining that it trivializes the Holocaust by de-emphasizing concentration-camp brutality while reaching for pathos. Entertainment Weekly’s fall movie preview called its winning of the Cannes Grand Jury prize “a sure sign we’re approaching millennium madness. . . . The comedy is what `Cinema Paradiso’ might have looked like were it made by the Marx Brothers.”
Yet “Life Is Beautiful” has won over many other dubious audiences. Not only was it a surprise hit of the Jerusalem Film Festival, but Benigni received the Jerusalem Award from the city’s mayor.
“When somebody tells me, `I don’t like your movie,’ this is the worst — for a clown, for a comedian especially, because if they don’t like the movie, I am lost,” Benigni said. “But I respect the opinion.”
Still, he blames some negative reaction on an ongoing prejudice against comedians. “They think it’s a comedy about the Holocaust, which is different, because this is a comedian talking about the Holocaust,” he said. “This is my way to talk about it.”
He noted that many comedians are drawn to darker material as they get older, such as Chaplin with his “Monsieur Verdoux” and “A King in New York.”
“There is sometimes something like an artistic racism, like comedy is a low level, comedians they can’t talk about tragedy. I know what tragedy is and what pain is. I respect so much this opinion, but I must say that a movie, it’s a dream, it doesn’t want to bother anyone. It’s just a dream, and if they don’t like it, they can continue to sleep.”
This dream still has its basis in reality. The death-camp atrocities may not always be explicitly portrayed, but they loom over the film’s second half, which also addresses a key Holocaust theme: saving the next generation, even at your own expense.
“Right,” Benigni said, “but this is the idea of the movie: more than the next generation, to protect the innocence, the purity, from the horror — to protect him from the trauma.. . . To protect the innocence is the highest moment of our lives. We are like God when we protect the innocence, and this is instinctual and natural to protect it. This is the story.”
