A Dangerous Lie: Roberto Benigni’s ‘Life is Beautiful’

Fulfilling the religion of filmmaking

Creating a fable out of the Holocaust is downright dangerous. Giorgio Cantarini as Giosuè (L) and Roberto Benigni as Guido in “Life is Beautiful.” Melampo Cinematografica

Art is powerful. It can make both true and false imaginings seem real. Both “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the “Communist Manifesto” changed the world—in opposite ways; art without goodness is dangerous.

For 70 years the Holocaust has commanded our most serious attention. Hitler’s concentration camps have stood for the greatest of human depravities. They force us to confront the most serious questions human consciousness ever must address: Is there justice? Why do the innocent suffer? What is the nature of evil? Does God exist? Since this can happen, what—really—are we?

Then along came Roberto Benigni with a sweet little movie about a father’s imaginative and self-sacrificial love for his son. So great is that love, says the film, that it can save his son from the Holocaust—not only from death, but from all effects of suffering and evil. The boy will grow up grateful to his father for having preserved his innocence from taint and him from pain.

The trouble is that the film also cuddles us with unreality. No need to ask why man is capable of such evil. What evil? No need to ask why innocents must undergo such terrible suffering. What suffering?

Before the happy family is taken to the camp. (L–R) Guido (Roberto Benigni), Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), and Giosuè (Giorgio Cantarini), in “Life is Beautiful.” Melampo Cinematografica

A Powerful Lie

The true objection to the “Life Is Beautiful” (1997) is not that it is not powerful. It is. Not that life is not beautiful. It is, if you do not find yourself in a concentration camp. Or perhaps, if you are a saint, even if you do.

The real objection to the film is that it lies about the concentration camps in order to justify its fantasy about life. It abolishes real suffering to enforce the false idea that the innocent child can be saved by a big dose of self-sacrificial parental love.

Inventive, self-sacrificial love is good. Trying to save your son from evil and suffering is good. And goodness can transform even ugly aspects of life into beauty. But the film is a big fat lie. In the reality of Hitler’s concentration camps, neither the boy’s innocence nor his life could possibly have been saved; he would have been dehumanized, starved, and murdered within days.

The film’s parable would be less offensive if what tested the father’s love were as symbolic as the fantasy means he uses to pass the test. Instead, the director has combined two incompatible forms of art—a true historical horror, in which no amount of love or sacrifice could have guaranteed the preservation of either innocence or survival, and a fairytale happy ending.

I do not object to either form of art—realism or fable. But their combination in this film is a corruption of both. The film uses an unrealistic concentration camp as a generic background of danger and stupidity against which to depict the fantasy triumph of love and self-sacrifice. In reducing that background to a mere cipher in its parable, the film compromises the horror of what, in real life, love sometimes has to overcome. As such, the film becomes a great lie masquerading as a bittersweet truth.

Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, L), although not Jewish, joins her family in the concentration camp, in "Life Is Beautiful." Melampo Cinematografica

What the Film Industry Sells

In an interview with the Washington Post, Benigni reveals the shallowness of his vision for the film: “When you are laughing you are suffering.… There is nothing higher than this. Even though laughing and crying [are] the same emotion, really.”

They aren’t, really. But his saying that they are tells us that for Benigni it is emotion itself—any emotion—that is the greatest thing in life, the only thing worth aiming for in making a movie. Valuing emotion for its own sake, and not as an appropriate (or inappropriate) response to some reality, defines the word “sentimentality.”

Why did so many love this sentimental film? The answer is given by Adin Steinsaltz in his book “Simple Words,” where he calls Hollywood a kind of religion of “intention, sentiment, and emotion.”

‘The Hollywood religion is … a great believer in the happy ending. … Hollywood conveys the message that the world is like a fairy tale: somehow, it will all work out well in the end. … The Hollywood religion is the ‘opiate of the masses.’

“Life Is Beautiful” is a falsification of reality not because life isn’t beautiful, but because seeing its beauty from inside a Nazi concentration camp is a lot harder than the film suggests. And the reason so many have been grateful to Mr. Benigni for this falsification is that it has provided what people have wanted for 50 years: A happy ending for the Holocaust consistent with their religion of happiness.

“Life is Beautiful” was a tremendous hit in 1997. Melampo Cinematografica

The Religion of Happiness

In the same interview, Benigni says he wanted to place his clown character “in the extreme situation ‘par excellence.’ And the goal is to reach some sort of poetry, or beauty.” For him poetry or beauty do not arise out of the truth of a situation. They are goals. The situation is constructed to produce them. Again, the essence of sentimentality.

“Most meaningful to Benigni,” says his interviewer, “have been the thousands of letters he’s received from children, thanking him for introducing them to a subject they knew little about, in a way they could comprehend.”

This sentence sends ice down my spine. Children now have a way to “comprehend the subject” thanks to a film that drags even the Holocaust into their parents’ religion of happiness.

Audiences are grateful to Mr. Benigni for giving them a way out of having to confront the horror: We can love our children enough to protect them from evil, and they will be protected. What a relief!

In presenting its lie, the film has nothing to say about what we really crave, a faith that can transcend the Holocaust through addressing it rather than avoiding it by escaping into fantasy, a faith not to Hollywood’s taste. But if we cannot find a way to see the beauty of life in the face of the sacred and terrifying truths of life, at least let us not settle for the false comfort of the ersatz beauty of sentimentality.

Seeing “Life Is Beautiful” as an image of heroism in the camps is folly. The true heroism we really seek cannot be found in such a film, and pretending that it can only prevents our seeking further.