Where "Life Is Beautiful" turns into something rare and extraordinary is not until midway through the film. Even the gradually increasing touches of political satire are nothing new, evoking Chaplin's "The Great Dictator": Guido's frantic attempts to wave pedestrians away from an automobile with malfunctioning brakes are mistaken for a stiff-armed salute a shopkeeper's doltish twin sons are named Benito and Adolph in an attempt to impress Dora, Guido impersonates a school inspector, giving the students an impromptu lesson on what he calls the "master race" by stripping his scrawny, plucked-chicken body down to baggy skivvies.
Over in Germany, Hitler's trigger finger is starting to get itchy, but for the first half of the film the machinations of world politics are only a backdrop to the main event Guido's comic attempts to woo his beloved, a schoolteacher named Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), away from her stuffed-shirt fiance Rodolfo (Amerigo Fontani).īenigni's pratfalls, the stock, commedia dell'arte characters, the flower pot falling from a second-story window, will all be familiar from his earlier work. "Life Is Beautiful" begins as the story of bumbling Italian waiter Guido Orefice (Benigni), set in Tuscany in the foreboding year of 1939 under Fascist premier Mussolini. It satisfies like a hot, square meal, although for much of the first two reels it looks like Benigni might be heading in the direction of his same old insubstantial slapstick shtick.
The film, which he co-wrote, directed and stars in, is a radical departure from the comedian's farcical canon. In Benigni's sad, funny and haunting "Life Is Beautiful," this emphatically is not the case. The buffoon-star and director of such Italian imports as "Johnny Stecchino" and "The Monster" is often easier to take in small bites, as with his supporting roles in Jim Jarmusch's "Down by Law" and "Night on Earth." Like too much cannoli, large doses of Roberto Benigni's rich lunacy can cloy the senses. Roberto Benigni co-wrote, directed and stars in "Life is Beautiful." (Miramax)Ĭhildren under 13 should be accompanied by a parent
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