[Part 1 is immediately below.]
A Central Disproportion
My own objection to the film is that, not with respect to any particular detail, but overall, artistically, it purveys an untruth. And that it does so is a matter, precisely, of balance. Those like MacCabe and Holt who speak of the film's 'faith' in close-range affective bonds or of its being a 'fable' about the protection of innocence are in a sense right, but I would express the same thing more harshly by calling it a cheap delusion. What I mean in saying this is that Life Is Beautiful contains a flagrant, central disproportion, whereby the dimension of love and hope is everywhere accented, while the cruelty, horror and extreme suffering that made up the reality of the story's chosen milieu are muted, marginalized, all but pushed out of view.
One is bound to ask: if this was the kind of balance the director wanted - hope writ very large against the mere suggestion of evil - why did he not place his tale of love against a lesser background, one less severe than this axiomatic piece of criminality of the twentieth century? It could have been an episode of paternal ingenuity and courage on, say, a bus journey whose passengers are temporarily menaced by drunken louts. For this is approximately the atmosphere that Benigni constructs for us. Put together so, however, Life Is Beautiful would have failed in its central purpose, which is to convey not just hope, but a hope of great amplitude and significance. To achieve that, Benigni needed the utmost extremity, a very paradigm of evil, against which to set off, to magnify, the hope. But he wants the extremity only as abstract symbol, emptied of its horror and its capacity to unsettle and terrify us, its capacity indeed to cast us down by focusing our minds on one of the less palatable truths about the nature of humankind. I agree, therefore, with those critics who have said that the film is mendacious, and a subtle form of denial: denial not of the Holocaust itself, but of 'the depth of its horrors' (Jonathan Romney, 'Camping it up', Guardian, February 12 1999).
To highlight this mendacity, I suggest that we imagine a similar style of tale set in relation to events that are closer to us in time. Call to mind what happened in Rwanda in 1994: a mass-participant genocide; people hacked and bludgeoned to death by the thousands, some of them by their neighbours; people, their tendons cut, left helpless and crying in pain overnight while the killers took some rest, to be killed the following morning; and much more of this kind. Imagine Benigni's touching story, with the father's clowning and the boy securing his 'prize' at the end, against this background, the machetes at work, cutting, maiming, killing. I put it that it would be - and would be seen and excoriated as - an obscenity. Rightly so, because it would be a merely edifying falsehood, attempting to uplift the spirits of people in comfort and safety, full in the face of an overwhelming horror, which is to say in practical denial of it. The point is that the Rwandan genocide has not yet had time to undergo the kind of sublimation into abstract symbolhood that, if Benigni's movie and the warmth of its reception are anything to go by, may be in the process of happening with the Holocaust. Consequently if Benigni's story had been placed in this more recent context, the offensiveness of the juxtaposition would have been impossible to overlook. Yet - and I do not need to dwell on it - what happened at Auschwitz and the other infernal sites of National Socialism was every bit as ghastly as the Rwandan blood-letting.
In defence of Life Is Beautiful against this line of criticism, it has been put to me in personal conversations I have had that the movie's director is entitled to assume a degree of familiarity by now with the general shape and the details of the Nazi universe of death and, taking them for granted, merely to sketch or allude to the relevant circumstances, adopting a lighter touch. The knowledge he thereby takes for granted, according to this view, undoes the imbalance I allege. I am unpersuaded by this on two counts. First, if the knowledge taken for granted really is, so to put it, active and operative with viewers of Benigni's film of reasonably healthy moral sensibility, I believe they must be repelled by it, as some in fact have been. For, as with the Rwandan example, they will then be seeing Guido's antics in the simultaneous 'presence' of: the Einsatzgruppen and other murder squads shooting naked, frightened and defenceless people; prisoners hung up agonisingly by their arms from trees; people beaten, tortured; bodies filthy with blood and excrement being removed from the gas chambers; and so forth. By contraposition, viewers of such sensibility who are not repelled do not have these scenes in their mind's eye, so that the taking for granted here is of the kind 'leaving out of sight', rather than of the kind 'relying on'. Second - a broader point implicit in the first - it is hard enough, psychologically, humanly, to keep one's attention focused on great extremity, great suffering. In general, nothing can be taken for granted about public awareness or concern in these matters. Rather, the need is to tell and be told; to remind and be reminded; to encourage and be encouraged not to look away or to give oneself too easy consolation.
David Denby has written that 'Benigni wants the authority... but not the actuality of the Holocaust', and that 'he protects the audience as much as Guido protects his son; we are all treated like children'. Denby suggests that people may now be exhausted by this subject and that audiences are coming away relieved and happy at having been allowed by Benigni to escape (The New Yorker, March 15 1999). He is right. It is as if the director-comedian were saying to us, 'It's okay, you can think about the Holocaust - and still feel cheerful and uplifted'. In that, his film is ugly and it is unfortunate. And if this does signal a broader cultural trend, then it is worrying, after the long period of public inattention to the Holocaust that there was following the Second World War, how quickly the route has been travelled from growing realization and awareness to a safely abstract symbolism.
To bring these thoughts on Life Is Beautiful to a conclusion: my argument is not that there can be no story of hope or love or decency coming out of the Holocaust. There can be, because there are, such stories, true ones. But the stories need to be told adequately within their context, in proper proportion, whether they be about an episode of help, emotional support or plain physical relief from hunger and extreme hardship - Primo Levi's 'moments of reprieve' - or about rescue, a life or a few lives saved within that vastness of grief and loss.