Life is Beautiful in a post-Jojo world

I've finally finished the movies I had borrowed from the library, which at one point were due back next Monday, the 18th. When I looked yesterday, they are now due ... June 27th. I sincerely hope the libraries will be open again before that, but who knows.

I learned the new due date before I watched Life is Beautiful, so I certainly could have put off the viewing. But it was already what I had planned for the evening last night, so I just went ahead with it.

The title of this post makes it sound like I am going to explore something profound today. Really, I just mean that having seen (and loved) Jojo Rabbit last year made me interested in revisiting the thing I saw it most regularly compared to. I had not seen Life is Beautiful since the autumn of 1998, when I was in graduate school in New York.

I quite liked Life is Beautiful at the time, ranking it my #16 out of the 58 movies I ranked in 1998. But the movie has suffered in our collective estimation over the years. Suffice it to say, when people compared Jojo Rabbit to Life is Beautiful, they did not mean it as a compliment.

Having randomly borrowed Life is Beautiful from the library, back when I had no idea I wouldn't be borrowing another movie for more than two months, gave me the opportunity to see if they're right.

Now, I should start by saying that the two movies don't actually have that much in common in terms of their plots. For starters, Jojo Rabbit never actually sets foot inside a concentration camp. But both movies do fall under the general umbrella of "movies that are trying to be funny despite featuring Nazis." When The Next Picture Show podcast chose an older movie to compare and contrast with Jojo, they selected The Producers. There's something valid about both choices, though both are also a stretch in certain ways.

One interesting difference is that while Jojo spends all its time in Nazi Germany, Life is Beautiful is not actually a holocaust movie for much of its running time. Although there are ominous little nuggets of what's to come, Beautiful spends its entire first hour in an idyllic Italian village, functioning mostly as a series of meet cutes between Roberto Benigni's Guido and Nicoletta Braschi's Dora, or "Principessa." How many meet cutes does one movie need, you might ask? Life is Beautiful has never met a meet cute it didn't like, so it puts in 17 of them. In fact, my primary memory of the first half of this movie is Guido running around a restaurant and repeatedly calling her Principessa. Even then it straddled the line between sweet and unctuous.

The issue, of course, was that Benigni had made primarily madcap farces in which his own talent for physical comedy took center stage. He was a bit of a Charlie Chaplin in that sense -- still is, I suppose, as he is still alive. Life is Beautiful was a change to something more serious, but even then, it required a lot of the silly to get there. Good silly, but still silly. The movie people should have compared it to, if they didn't -- though they probably did -- was Chaplin's The Great Dictator.

The approach mostly works, but I couldn't help feel now, as I did then, that there's a lot of filler in that first hour. While the set pieces are, without exception, sort of delightful, many of them don't provide the film with much momentum toward where it's going. A scene that does, but still kind of falls short of the mark, is one where Guido poses as a fascist official in order to get closer to Principessa, not realizing that he is visiting her school for the purposes of talking about the racial superiority of white people. He takes the piss out of that argument, of course, before the real official shows up and prompts him to flee through the nearest window. But the movie doesn't really do anything to ponder the significance of that scene at that moment, meaning it's not really building toward something.

While the first hour does allow us to get to know Guido and Dora, and to like them (unless we're already rolling our eyes at them), it ends up feeling like a lot of build-up before they are shipped off to the camps. That said, I don't think we could have handled a lot more of the film's second half. Not that it's bleak, but that it kind of continues hitting the same marks as Guido tries desperately to prove to his son that they are involved in a game, and they have to do all the right things to score 1,000 points and win a tank.

This is a good idea too, and effectively carried off, for the most part. But the way it's executed, it tends to diminish the presence of the others around them who are there and suffering through the experience. Guido has long and loud talks with his son while everyone else in the room is exhausted or trying to sleep, where he's going on and on about the rules of the game. Wouldn't any of the others yell at him for kind of commandeering the scenario and putting a happy face on it just for the benefit of one child, when none of the other children got a similar amount of energy invested toward blinding them to the horrors in front of them? Even if it's the most parental instinct in the world, would all the others be so eager to "play along," as it were?

Then there's the part of it where Guido somehow seems to have free rein of the camp, without consequences. There's the part that's reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption, where Guido gets control of a loudspeaker and a record player -- or are those even two separate scenes? -- and gets to send an extended message/music to Principessa before he is stopped. In Shawshank, Andy gets a month in the hole for that transgression. But in a concentration camp, where they could just kill the offender without any repercussions, Guido seems to get away with it for a very long time, and is either never discovered, or not punished if he is.

Complaints aside, I ultimately do still feel fondly toward Life is Beautiful. I guess the biggest comparison to Jojo is that both movies involves a director known for comedy making a successful transition into something more serious. I think Taika Waititi's venture is ultimately more successful, but I think he also had less far to go than Benigni.