1998 Winner, Life Is Beautiful

Life is Beautiful

Director:  Roberto Bengini

Distributed by:  Miramax Films

Released:  December 1997

Country:  Italy

I generally don’t watch the Academy Awards, mostly because I can’t stomach the self-congratulations and self-serving moralizing.  But in 1999, I happened to catch the part of the ceremony when Roberto Benigni won the Oscar for Best Actor for Life Is Beautiful.  Benigni spazzed out, standing on his seat, almost stepping on Steven Spielberg’s head on the way to get his trophy.  He was so enthusiastic and jubilant, I couldn't help but think . . . man, is that guy annoying.  I honestly wasn’t much looking forward to checking this film out because of that memory.  I knew Benigni from this Oscar flip out and from playing the son of Inspector Clouseau in The Son of the Pink Panther, director Blake Edward’s last film, so the only reason I made myself watch this movie was for My BFF Project.

Chairs are not stairs, paisano!

Am I ever glad I made myself watch this funny and touching film.  The movie is essentially two stories about Guido, a Jewish man living in pre-WWII Italy, played by Benigni.  In the first part of the movie, Benigni is a goofball waiter working at his uncle’s restaurant.  He is a classic underachiever—witty, funny, and smart, but  just wants to goof off and make everyone mad at him rather than apply himself.  He meets the beautiful and wealthy Dora, way out of his league, and sets out to get her interested in him.  His detailed and elaborate plans to win her go off like clockwork and are very funny.  There’s a bit of cornball in this part of the movie, but once in a while, a little cornball is good, especially given the second, and main, part of this movie coming.

Flash forward several years, and Guido and Dora are married with a 7-year-old son, Geosue, played with cuteness-at-the-acceptable-level by Giorgio Cantarini.  Guido is a doting father who keeps the family entertained and loving life.  The problem is, of course, this is the beginning of the war and Jews don’t seem to be doing any better in Italy than they did in the countries Germany occupies.  Father and son get rounded up and sent to a concentration camp, with Dora, a non-Jew, following.  To shelter Geosue as much as he can, Guido pretends the whole thing is a game, and that the winning team will be rewarded with a brand new tank, an idea that delights the little boy.  There are moments of despair and disappointment, but Guido’s sense of humor is what keeps Geosue, and the movie, going.

Cute, but not too cute, Geosue

Concentration camps don’t seem like the appropriate setting for a comedy, and when it comes down to it, this movie is not really a comedy—more like an upbeat tragedy.  Stalag 17, Billy Wilder’s masterful 1953 film set in a German POW camp is a good comparison in terms of tone.  Benigni sets the table in the first half:  Guido is a comic figure, with not an ounce of tragedy in him, while courting his future wife.  Because of this set up, we can buy into Guido’s upbeat, yet realistic approach, to dealing with the grimmest of situations.

Note:  Fans of the John Sturges’ Magnificent Seven from 1960 will recognize German actor Horst Buchholz as a “good” Nazi.  Life Is Beautiful was Buchholz’s last film in his 45-year career.

The Title:  La vita è bella.   In can be even in a concentration camp.

Horst Buchholz

The Culture:  The Holocaust in Italy was not quite the same as in Germany and other German-occupied parts of Europe, though between 1943 and 1945 about 10,000 Jews were deported, primarily to Auschwitz.  Benigni intentionally made this film historically inaccurate so as to differentiate things from the actual Holocaust. 

Agenda Danger:  Some objected to the idea of making a film with this subject matter with comedic elements to it.  But the film is not focused on the evil of the treatment of the Jews, but rather, the resilience of the human spirit.

Best Picture that year:  Shakespeare in Love.  Benigni beat out Tom Hanks for his role in Saving Private Ryan, and I am open to the argument that Hanks only lost because of his prior two wins for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump.  However, I consider Shakespeare in Love’s win to be a travesty unequaled in Oscar history, and one of the reasons I don’t watch the Academy Awards.

She's a little bit Country

Rating:  When I was about 10 (when there were three channels to watch on TV), my family sometimes watched the Donny and Marie Show—you know, the “She’s a little bit country, he’s a little bit rock and roll” variety show (Don’t judge!  I was a kid!).  While we would watch, on occasion we would catch my little brother, who couldn’t have been older than 8 or 9 at the time, beaming widely whenever the pretty Marie Osmond came on.  He would get mad and his face would turn beet-red whenever we called him out on it, but try as he might to stay angry, within a minute or two the smile would return to his face involuntarily.  That’s how I felt when watching this movie, which I had gone into deciding I would not like.  I bet if someone had walked in on me watching this movie, they would have asked me what I was smiling about. So you could say Life Is Beautiful is my Marie Osmond.

1989 Winner, Cinema Paradiso

Cinema Paradiso

Director:  Giuseppe Tornatore 

Distributed by:  Miramax Films 

Released:  November 1988

Country:  Italy

As with most technological improvements, advancements in movie-making and movie-watching bring with them an unforeseen downside.  Availability is one of those advancements.  Nowadays, even foreign films from 25 years ago can be found on DVD by going on Amazon or just using a library card.  You can stream movies by using a remote control in your living room (and by “you” I mean "not me"; I’m still not trained in the art of Netflix or Hulu or any of that kind of stuff).  But the price of this availability is, simply put, the Movie Theater.  I’m not talking about the multiplexes with 20 or more movies being shown at the same time; I mean the old movie houses where huge crowds would all watch the same movie together as a community experience.

The Cinema Paradiso is one of those movie houses.  In post-World War II Italy, Alfredo is the

Toto checking out some deleted scenes

theater’s projectionist, at a time when being so was more of a profession than a job.  But the star of the film is Salvatore, a 5-year-old who lost his father in the war and loves to hang out at the theater.  Salvatore, or Toto as he is called, is a handful, both to Alfredo, who considers him a pest, and to the local priest, who can’t get Toto to be a proper altar boy.  The movie is told in flashback, as the adult Toto learns of the death of Alfredo, who had grown to be a father figure to him.

Early in the film, Alfredo is pre-screening a film for the priest—and whenever a kissing scene shows up, the priest rings his bell, an indication for Alfredo to mark the film for cutting.  No kissing is aloud to be shown to the masses.  When the films are screened to the public, the crowd lustily boos and jeers, good-naturedly expressing its anger at the Church censorship.  Toto, the film lover who will grow up to be a successful director, wonders about the scenes being cut, which eventually leads to the film’s famous and touching finish.

Annoying kid in an American film

Where to begin on what is good about this film?  First, young Salvatore Cascio is terrific as a little boy full of mischief yearning for a male figure in his life.  There is something about young kids in foreign films that American films don’t seem to have—Toto, the young boy in Life is Beautiful, the youngest son in Journey of Hope, the granddaughter in Antonia’s Line—these kids show a charming endearing quality that the annoying wise-ass Macaulay Culkins (Home Alone) turn into obnoxiousness in American films.  (Add to the list of charming kid performances that of the boy from the “foreign language” Calcutta part of the current film Lion.)  The first part of Cinema Paradiso is worth watching just for Toto, and for his relationship with Alfredo, who sees greatness in him.

Adult Toto loving the cinema

But the heart of the movie is in its love of movies themselves and the movie-going experience.  The cinema, and to a lesser extent, the theater that is the Cinema Paradiso, are what bring people together in war-weary Italy.  Most especially, the theater brings Alfredo and Toto together at a time both need it.  I think of theater-going as when I have to contend with the older people behind me loudly pointing out the actors they recognize, or the younger people texting their BFF's while the movie is showing. At the Cinema Paradiso, a lot of the fun is the crowd laughing or jeering or even sitting mesmerized  together as a community.

The story, the characters and acting, and great cinematography are all perfect here.  Director Giuseppe Tornatore, who has made three English-language films and several noted Italians films since, made it difficult on himself to top this film made at the beginning of his career.  The score by his frequent collaborator, the brilliant composer Ennio Morricone  (perhaps most famous to Americans for the scores of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and The Mission),  is perhaps one of his best, and that's saying something.   

I’m not sure all the films Alfredo showed from the projection room of the Cinema Paradiso were great films, but if they were half as good as Cinema Paradiso, the huge movie house would be packed every night.

The Title:  The Italian name of the movie is Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, or New Paradise Cinema.

The Culture:  A great look at small-town Italy right after World War II.

Agenda Danger:  Whatever commentary may be derived from the over-protective and controlling Catholic priest is more than offset by the humor of Toto’s interactions with him and the emotional ending.

Best Picture that year: Driving Miss Daisy

Rating:  Italian cinema is noteworthy for so many great films, like Life is Beautiful (1998), The Bicycle Thieves (1948), and the works of Fellini (such as 1963’s 8 ½ and 1960’s La Dolce Vita).  This film takes a back seat to none of them.  It's a movie about loving the movies that makes you love movies even more.