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Roberto Benigni: Life Is Beautiful
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Summary: Explores the Roberto Benigni film, Life is Beautiful. Demonstrates how the film can be seen as an example of physical or slapstick comedy. Compares the Italian Benigni to American comedian Charlie Chaplin.
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Conan O’Brien did a comedy bit on his show four years ago predicting that Roberto Benigni would someday lose many of his newfound fans by making a sequel to Life Is Beautiful called Life Is Beautiful 2: Electric Boogaloo. The reality for Benigni, in the form of his latest film Pinocchio, is possibly even more disastrous. His overstuffed take on Carlo Collodi’s fairy tale is so tacky and misbegotten that break-dancing Nazis would look completely at home here.
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Benigni is probably best known outside Italy for his 1997 tragicomedy Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella), filmed in Cortona and Arezzo... written by Cerami. The film is about an Italian Jewish man who tries to protect his son's innocence during his internment at a Nazi concentration camp, by telling him that the Holocaust is an elaborate game and he must adhere very carefully to the rules to win. Benigni's father had spent two years in a concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, and La Vita è bella is based in part on his father's experiences. In 1998, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and Benigni personally won the Best Actor. The Best Foreign Language Film is awarded to the film itself, but Academy rules stipulate that the director will accept the award.[2] The score by Nicola Piovani also won an Oscar. Famously, in the midst of being so giddy with delight, he climbed on the back of the seat for his procession to the stage and applauded the audience after he was told he had won one of his Oscars.
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One hates to be brash about it, but just what in the hell happened to Roberto Benigni? For most Americans, their first chance to witness this one time witty whirlwind work his ferociously funny magic was in either Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law or Night on Earth (where his non-stop verbal barrage confession to a dead priest was priceless). He crafted a few foreign film feasts that Western audiences responded to with favor and fiscal approval (The Monster and Johnny Stecchino). But after a three-year hiatus, he went and did something absolutely deadly to his livelihood. He returned to the big screen with an awful piece of offal that stained the memory of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. This concentration camp as comedy club kiddie circus was called Life is Beautiful and as a "love it or hate it" historical hemorrhoid it should have been the final word from this overly earnest buffoon.
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Here some news about Benigni's upcoming project, Pinocchio. Roberto Cerami, co-screenwriter along with Benigni of Life is Beautiful, talked about "Pinocchio" in an interview given to Italian online magazine IlNuovo (www.ilnuovo.it). Cerami and Benigni have just finished the second draft for the much anticipated movie.
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In his earlier movies, like Johnny Stecchino and The Monster, Benigni displayed a comic talent some have compared with Chaplin's. In Life Is Beautiful, he still serves up ample smiles and laughter. But this movie walks the tightrope between comedy and tragedy with an acrobat's skill, and Benigni wears the dual masks as comfortably as most people wear their arms and legs.
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Life Is Beautiful