Word: guido
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Benigni, Life is Beautiful: Thenewly-internationalized comic superstar seems tobe out of luck in the Best Actor race. TheAcademy's aforementioned xenophobia will take itstoll, surely, but there's another problem as well.It's not a great dramatic performance. As in thedirecting category, Benigi's portrayal of therelentlessly mirthful Guido is for the film but bythe same token is necessarily unextraordinary.Bengini is an actor of great comic talent, butthat can only take him so far. The whole point ofLife is Beautiful is that Guido must keephis dopey, funny face on from start to finish inorder to combat the horrors...
...would be a pretty thing to think that a gentle, genial spirit like Guido's could effectively resist totalitarianism at its most terrible. But it cannot--unless, of course, you rewrite the past and in the process travesty tragedy. The witnesses to the Holocaust--its living victims--inevitably grow fewer every year. The voices that would deny it ever took place remain strident. The newer generations hurry heedlessly into the future. In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent. Sentimentality is a kind of fascism too, robbing...
...Cerami) of Life Is Beautiful, which has been winning awards and high popularity in Europe. Benigni won't--can't--have it any other way, for even a hint of the truth about the Holocaust would crush his comedy and reduce to absurdity his "fable" about a man named Guido making a sort of hide-and-seek game out of camp life, diverting his four-year-old son (Giorgio Cantarini) from its harshness and encouraging him to lie low. The idea, of course, is to save the boy from the gas chamber, where the young, the old and the sickly...
...also fair to say that Benigni--whose self-love, if not his comic skills, could charitably be described as Chaplinesque, or perhaps more accurately as Robin Williamsish--devotes much of his film to peacetime passages overestablishing Guido's childlike yet shrewd, cheeky yet romantic character as a wise innocent, an idealized Everyman. His pursuit of his principessa, who is engaged to a local Fascist leader (and is sweetly played by Benigni's wife Nicoletta Braschi), and his casually farcical assaults on decorum and authority are, if you have a taste for simpleton comedy, inoffensive...
...ending of this film is its greatestaccomplishment. Though tragedy is involved, theimagination ultimately triumphs, and Guido's"game," in Giosue's mind, seems to deliver on itspromise...