A Story of Magic
February 27, 2020

     You know who understands the real magic?  Roberto Benigni.

     * * *

   I saw Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning film Life Is Beautiful in the theater (before it won its Oscars) and wept.  No, I mean sobbed.  Giant, audible, messy, whole-body-heaving cries, in the theater.  And I wasn't the only one.

    It was early 1999, which happened to be the middle of my sophomore year of college.  It was the first year that my roommate, Carrie, and I tried to see all the films that were nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards for the year, plus maybe a few more that struck our fancy.  The Oscars would be held in March that year, so we crammed in as many as we reasonably could on our shoestring budgets between the time the nominations were announced and the awards show aired.  So Life is Beautiful was on our list.

    The film tells the story of a Jewish-Italian father who keeps his young son alive through their internment in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II by weaving an elaborate tale about their circumstances.  I would not say that he lies to his son – lying implies deceit, and there is not a shred of deceit, not one drop of guile, in the father's character, who is played by Benigni himself.  (Benigni co-wrote the screenplay and directed the film, in addition to playing the father.)  Rather, because the child is so young – no more than five or six years old, at most, when they are interned (and separated from the child's mother, who is placed in the women's area of the camp) – the father tells the boy that they have been chosen to play a complex game in which they can earn points by doing various strange and uncomfortable tasks.  The players with the most points at the end of the game, he explains, will win a military tank.  The son is excited to play, and obediently follows his father's every instruction, completely trusting him even in the most difficult situations. 

   The film follows the father-son duo through a series of close scrapes and near misses that demonstrate the father's unflagging efforts to preserve the innocence of his son's childhood in the face of the darkest evil.  If the father is grief-stricken and terrified at their circumstances, he never betrays that to his son.  The father clearly understands that torture and death are probable, perhaps even imminent.  Yet he also understands that the Nazis could kill his son's spirit even if he somehow managed to survive the death camp.  So the father keeps up the game-story with his son, as a long-shot strategy to save both the boy's body and his soul, whole, intact, and integrated. 

    When word eventually arrives that the Allies are coming to liberate the camp, the father knows what this means:  that all the remaining prisoners will be murdered.  So he gives his son his sternest, most absolute instruction of the entire "game": he must stay in a box that the father puts him in and remain perfectly silent and still, no matter what, until his tank arrives.  They are very close to winning, the father tells him, and this is the last task he must perform in order to win, but he must do it noiselessly and without moving at all.

    If you haven't seen the film yet, I won't give away the ending other than to say, (1) the Allies do arrive, and (2) giant, audible, messy, whole-body-heaving cries, in the theater.

     It was magical sobbing, but sobbing nonetheless.   

     Oh, and did I mention, the film is subtitled?  I watched the whole thing in Italian, with the English subtitles trotting along at the bottom of the screen.  It didn't make the slightest bit of difference.  At some point in the film, I forgot it was in Italian and that the subtitles were even there. 

    Life Is Beautiful did not win Best Picture that year – although it did win the Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Score.  Also, Roberto Benigni himself took home the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in the film, and his acceptance speech – including the way  he bounded to the stage like a happy lamb – was a feat of pure magic in its own right.  His wild, childlike joy will restore your faith in humanity, so you should find that on the Interwebs and watch it too.  

    When people ask me today what my favorite movie is, I always tell them that Life Is Beautiful is the most hopeful story of real magic that I've ever encountered.  More on that tomorrow.