Beyond Life Is Beautiful: Comedy and Tragedy in the Cinema of Roberto Benigni

The field of Italian cinema studies has seen an upsurge of scholarship on Roberto Benigni and his opus ever since his movie La vita è bella was awarded three Academy Awards in 1999 (Best Actor, Best Foreign Movie, Best Original Score). Since then, Benigni has become a cause célèbre, as critics have praised or taken him to task for his depiction of the Holocaust in that movie, but also as they have revisited the rest of his cinematic career to unearth its origins, its depths, and its shortcomings. Grace Russo Bullaro's new edited volume manages to add some welcome insights to this already crowded field of study. Like many edited works, the volume has peaks and valleys in the quality of the work submitted; but, especially in the second half, the contributions show fresh perspectives in the discussion of the Tuscan actor and director's work.

Russo Bullaro's decision to divide the articles into two sections, "The Foundation" and "A Prismatic Look at Life Is Beautiful," works well. The essays are thus grouped together in two phases: those that discuss Benigni as actor and director in works other than his most celebrated movie, and those that revisit Life Is Beautiful through new approaches and insights. While it is difficult to see the "beyond" of the title emerging from either section (since most contributors focus on Benigni's work before or during Life Is Beautiful), the book succeeds, as the editor suggests, "to look more closely not only at Life Is Beautiful, but also at the fundamental theoretical, thematic, conceptual and structural elements that have characterized the Benigni signature style since the beginning" (23). Indeed, the contributions are varied enough to discuss the majority of Benigni's work as an actor and director, both on Italian television and in the movies, from You Upset Me (1983) all the way to the international cinematic flop Pinocchio (2002). However, because the first section attempts to cover more ground than the second, it appears somewhat less cohesive.

One recurring assertion in the first section is that Benigni's movies are more than humoristic routines. Both David Scott Diffrient ("Italian Sketch Films and the Narrative Genealogy of Roberto Benigni's You Upset Me") and William Van Watson ("The Italian Buster Keaton") wish to show that Benigni's work is intimately indebted to the commedia dell'arte, which allows him to critique and subvert dominant social paradigms. Thus, his movies and acting are, respectively, a "veiled treatise against religious dogma" (54), and a critique of the mechanization of human activities in contemporary society through a reinvention of Keaton's burlesque and the appropriation of Truffaldino, the most subversive character of the commedia (69–70, 75–77). In similar fashion, Umberto Taccheri's "Johnny Stecchino: L'Italia nel caleidoscopo," reinvents the eponymous movie as a "film impegnato" (95) that criticizes the collusion of mafia, politics, and power. Of the remaining contributions to this section, Rebecca West's "Benigni's Pinocchio" details the viewers' response to Benigni's long-awaited 2002 movie, highlighting the specific cultural reasons it flopped in the United States but also noticing the intrinsic flaws—the wooden acting, bad makeup, and overreliance on special effects—that doomed it to irrelevance in both Italy and America. The remaining essays in this section, Victoria Kirkham's "Benigni's Postmodern Storehouse of Culture" and Vittorio Montemaggi's "Perché non ho scritto la Divina Commedia? Perché non c'ho pensato," sometimes overshoot their marks. Kirkham's learned article pans through the variety of cultural signifiers and references she encounters in Benigni's work, but does not engage them sufficiently from a critical standpoint. Montemaggi, instead, makes too much of Benigni's work by suggesting that Dante and Benigni share similar understandings of human personhood and relationships, and have thus similar ethical and theological dynamics (113).

The section that revisits La vita è bella is stronger and balances the positive, gushing criticism oftentimes associated with this movie against more nuanced critiques of the movie's outcomes. The article that introduces the section, Gefen Baron's "Benigni's Life-Affirming Lie," revisits many standard reasons why Life Is Beautiful works as an "aesthetic and moral response to the Holocaust," to the point that, in an excess of enthusiasm, the author affirms it to be "possibly the most morally accurate film about the Holocaust ever made" (182). However, when the author claims that those who criticize the movie's distortion of the Holocaust embrace a "simplistic position that underestimates the sophistication of both the film and the audience" (185), she opens herself to the kind of rebuff that is underscored in the criticism espoused by other articles in this section. This overestimation of the audience's response is most clearly revealed in the concluding article, Janice Fernheimer's "Breaking the Commandments of Holocaust Representation," a study of viewers' responses to Life Is Beautiful and Schindler's List that shows how many moviegoers "enjoyed" Life Is Beautiful precisely because it displaces reality and makes it more palatable and less difficult to handle.

Similarly, Grace Russo Bullaro ("Life Is Beautiful and the Protection of Innocence: Fable, Fairy Tale, or Just Excuses?") and Erminia Passannanti ("Ma la vita è davvero bella? Lo spettacolo dell'Olocausto, ovvero del nuovo kitsch") correct the general tendency to see this movie through optimistic lenses. In the first of these essays, after discussing Italian responses to the movie (and somewhat erroneously suggesting that Italians' "education on the subject [of the Holocaust] is very poor" [231]; it is no poorer than that of the American people who, in many polls, have shown an inconsistent and approximated knowledge of the events), Russo Bullaro uses Bruno Bettelheim's psychoanalytic approach to fairy tales to call into question Benigni's stated desire to protect the character Giosué, the child-actor Giorgio Cantarini who portrays him, and, as Russo Bullaro accurately points out, his audience, from the full-blown horrors of the Holocaust. The end result is that not only the child's development will be hindered by these protective measures, but the spectators' understanding of the Holocaust will be incomplete. Passannanti's article instead takes to task Benigni's aptly named "retorica dell'incanto" (254). She then deconstructs any claims to postmodern relativism in the interpretation of the movie and attacks the detachment produced in the spectators by Benigni's rhetorical and illusory "feel-good" routines, which only end up producing a pastiche of kitsch moments, rendered all the more absurd by the movie's happy ending. The remaining two essays in this section, Laura Leonardo's "La torta etiope e il cavallo ebreo" and Mirna Cicioni's "No True Darkness? The Critical Response to Life Is Beautiful in Italy and Australia," explore, respectively, the value of colonial symbols and of Italian oppression of Jews in the movie vis-à-vis historical facts; and, once more, the reception of the movie in two audiences half a world apart.

The volume provides the reader with a kaleidoscopic view of criticism, both negative and positive, on Benigni's work as a comedian, actor, and director. While occasionally the writers could have been more careful in their editing (on more than one occasion, citations are missing page numbers and are not traceable in footnotes or endnotes, and typos are also somewhat frequent), the book is undoubtedly praiseworthy. It is a necessary volume for any scholar who wishes to pursue a more in-depth analysis of Benigni and his work.