Andrew Worsdale Movies of the week
Hate has always been a powerful driving force for movie narratives; whether it’s the supposedly morally correct vigilante hatred of Dirty Harry’s “Feeling lucky Punk?”, Ralph Fiennes diabolically loathsome Krakow Nazi Commandant, Amon Goeth, teetering on the brink of racial madness in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, or Malcolm McDowell’s droog, Alex, who chooses violence and hatred as his form of self-expression in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The release this week of Life is Beautiful and American History X bring racial hatred and violence to the celluloid forefront yet again.
Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, which he stars in, co-wrote and directed, has been attacked in some circles for supposedly mocking the Holocaust, but in fact, the opposite is true. He takes the subject matter very seriously, delivering a film that is almost unbearably touching.
The movie is like two films in one – the first half light as souffl – the equivalent of the kind of silly romantic Italian farces we saw in the 1970s – while the second half is poignant and powerful. Benigni acknowledges these differences in the opening voice-over of the picture where the young boy, now grown up, reflects on the story saying: “This is like a fable, there is sorrow, but there is also happiness and laughter.”
It starts out in a typically breezy way with Benigni as Guido, a naive guy who arrives in a small Tuscan town with his poet buddy Ferrucio (Sergio Bustric). He falls in love with a young school teacher, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni’s wife and co-star in most of his films), but she is already engaged to the local Fascist official who Guido has had several confrontations with. A fairy tale romance ensues with Guido using coincidence and comic pranks to his romantic advantage.
In a dazzling and seamless transition we are transported six years ahead and the couple are happily married with a young son, Giosue (an enchanting Giorgio Cantarini). World War IIis in its final days and Jewish Italian families like Guido’s are the subject of constant persecution. Guido is determined to shield his son from the brutal racism surrounding their lives. It all comes to a head, however, when he and the kid are herded on to a train and sent off to a concentration camp. Dora, a gentile, puts herself on the same train out of her love for her family.
The idea for the film came to Benigni when he read a line attributed to Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was trapped in a bunker, waiting for Stalin’s apparatchiks to knock him off. He wrote that despite the horror of his fate he still thought “life is beautiful”. Says Benigni: “I believe that laughter saves us, it forces us to consider the other side of things, the surreal, the funny side. Being able to imagine prevents us from being reduced to ashes, from being crushed like twigs. It gives us the strength to survive the endless night.”
Although the first half of the film is too light and crazy in comparison to the wrenching poignancy and dark humour of the latter half, it is nevertheless a major accomplishment and Benigni’s Academy Award for Best Actor must have been as much for his achievement as co-writer and director as for actor. As a performer he rekindles his funny-face antics that were used to such great effect in Johnny Stecchino, where he played a mild-mannered bus driver and his spitting image, a Sicilian gangster – the film became the highest grossing film in Italy ever.
But in Life is Beautiful, Benigni reaches creative heights worthy of Charlie Chaplin, who effectively balanced satire and poignancy in his 1940 film The Great Dictator, where he played a Jewish barber who is mistaken for Adenoid Hynkel, the Hitler-like dictator of Tomania.
Adolf Eichmann boasted that helping to send six million people to their deaths would allow him to “leap laughing into his grave”. In his movie Benigni gives some form of poignant and funny revenge to the victims. Beautifully designed by Danilo Donati and photographed by Sergio Leone’s collaborator, Tonino Delli Colli (of Once Upon a Time in the West fame), the movie is a perfect balancing act. Although the first half is forgetfully easy, the conclusion of the film is devastatingly audacious in the way it makes you both laugh and cry.
More serious, but equally accomplished, is Tony Kaye’s American History X, which deals with racism, neo-Nazis and violence in contemporary Los Angeles. The film is reminiscent of Geoffrey Wright’s Australian film Romper Stomper, which had Russell Crowe as a skinhead determined not to “go the way of the Abo.”
American History X is less contrived than Wright’s film and is made completely memorable by Edward Norton’s superb Oscar- nominated performance. He plays Derek Vinyard, a violent and brilliant neo-Nazi who is jailed for killing two black men attempting to steal his car.
Most of the film is told in flashback as it traces how he developed from being an upset teenager to become the leader of a gang of skinheads in Venice Beach. The film follows his slow descent into this world of hatred and then how he attempts to drag himself out of it, while his younger brother (Edward Furlong) goes down the same destructive road.
Kaye, one of the world’s leading directors of commercials, apparently wanted to take his name off the film’s credits after distributors New Line re-cut the film. At times the movie is indeed simplistic, but Kaye does a formidable job as director, lighting cameraman and operator. The film looks at times like a documentary filled with tight close-ups and hand-held interior scenes that blaze with grainy realism.
With visuals, action and dialogue, the film explores how racism and violence, although irrational, nasty and illogical, can seem attractive, especially to marginalised white people looking for someone to blame for their problems. At the preview a woman sitting next to me was weeping after the film, a catharsis that I also revelled in in Life is Beautiful.
Hate sells movie tickets, but in both films love wins through despite the tragedies involved.