Are We Winning Yet? Spring 1999

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Life is Beautiful (La Vita e Bella), directed by Roberto Benigni (Melampo Cinematografica, 1997), 114 minutes.

The Last Days, directed by James Moll (October Films, 1998), 90 minutes.

Life Is Beautiful and The Last Days could not be more different films, though both take the Holocaust as their subject and both garnered Academy Awards. The more well-known of the two, Italian comic Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, is a piece of fiction about an Italian waiter who sacrifices everything to protect his son from the grim realities of the concentration camp. The Last Days (executive produced by Steven Spielberg) is a documentary account of the Nazis' final efforts to extinguish the Jews of Hungary, told by five camp survivors. While their perspectives differ dramatically, each film is concerned with resolving the staggering horror of one of twentieth-century history's darkest chapters. Neither succeeds entirely in that daunting mission.

There are two possible and plausible ways to interpret Life Is Beautiful, one of which is more charitable than the other. The film begins with a voice-over characterizing the story we are about to see as a "fable." If we take this description seriously, we are prepared for the unreality that the film delivers. Benigni's antics are hilariously fanciful, while the scenes in the concentration camp are quite elliptical. If the film is in fact a fable, perhaps we don't need to see more than we do of Nazi atrocities. We have all seen the skeletal bodies, the mass graves, the haunting footage of the liberation. In Benigni's fairy tale, the evil darkness of the world is background, not foreground. We may be surrounded by child-killers, but there are unique and life-giving exceptions: the child in Life ...

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