Word: holocaustic
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...concentration camp as presented by Roberto Benigni, the star, director and co-writer (with Vincenzo 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...
Life is Beautiful is a truly rare and unexpected creation: a comedy about the Holocaust. One of several miracles that writer, director and actor Roberto Benigni performs in this film is to convince the audience that this is not a contradiction in terms. And though the humor has some dark undertones, it's as far as can be from a black comedy. Life is Beautiful is a species of film that hasn't quite been categorized yet and that might be difficult for fans of Benigni's extraordinary work to reproduce...
Scenes in the style of Mr. King, normally complex and intriguing, are here sickening. Certainly the convention that spares cute animals in Hollywood movies, normally annoying, is here unforgivable: a movie that seems to pride itself on confronting its audience with the fact of the Holocaust nonetheless stops short of this triviality, which makes one consider how real the Holocaust is for this movie, and so for its audience. The ethics of making Dussander the interesting character and his strident accusers the bland and vapid ones are, of course, also questionable. Perhaps if he were a man at once horrified...
...giving the masterful performance one expects of him. McKellan takes a character whom the audience almost instinctively rejects and makes him immensely intriguing, even appealing. Of course, Dussander also becomes appealing to his counterpart, Todd Bowden (Brad Renfro), a high school student who begins the movie diligently researching the Holocaust. Todd in fact is the one who discovers that old Mr. Dussander is a former S.S. guard, the discovery that sets the movie off on its course of alternating revelation and deceit. Renfro's acting is generally bland and flat, more appropriate to a sitcom, or an after-school special...
...create this kind of world. The problem with Apt Pupil, of course, is not its structure but its subject, suggesting that a former S.S. agent is knowing and mature while the Todd Bowdens of the world, striving after justice, are hopelessly naive. Toward the end of the movie, a Holocaust survivor spots Dussander, who, it turns out, killed his wife and his two daughters. The man hurries away and falls to his knees crying. The near-silent dignity of the man's role is undercut by the way the movie seems to want to characterize him. While Dussander, with...