Life Is Beautiful Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Life Is Beautiful Blu-ray Movie Review

A remarkable modern classic debuts on Blu-ray.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 26, 2011

Not that many films hold the rather odd distinction of getting a lot of press for awards night acceptance (or non-acceptance as the case may be) behavior, but there are a few that spring immediately to mind. In the touching category, there’s Hattie McDaniel’s heartstring tugging speech when she was named the first African American winner of an Academy Award for her marvelous portrayal of Mammy in Gone With the Wind. In the more bizarre category, there was George C. Scott’s no-show for Patton, leading to an aghast Goldie Hawn, who presented the Best Actor Award that year, left giggling at the podium. A couple of years later the inimitable Marlon Brando sent the equally inimitable Sacheen Littlefeather, a Native American rights activist, to pick up his award for The Godfather, with Ms. Littlefeather clad in traditional garb. Ah, memories, pressed between the pages of our collective minds. But in terms of pure joy and unbridled exuberance, nothing will probably ever match Roberto Benigni’s headline making dance across the backs of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s auditorium chairs when his Life is Beautiful was named Best Foreign Language Film that year. Strangely, Benigni managed to be at least relatively more restrained when he picked up a Best Actor statuette a bit later in the evening, perhaps because he had, as he stated in his acceptance speech, “used up all [his] English.” The pure ebullience that Benigni so aptly displayed that evening is also part and parcel of what still remains his most famous film. Making a sweet natured, more or less comedic film built around the Holocaust might seem too outrageous and even audacious to consider, but the wonder of Life is Beautiful is that it works so, well, beautifully. Part of that is due to the fact that the film plays like, to use the term voiced by the narrator, a “fable,” and that “once-removed-from reality” approach helps to bridge the gap between the film’s considerable whimsy and the actual horrors that time visited on so many people.

Also delivering the film from being too melodramatic is the fact that the first hour or so takes place in the lead up to the most devastating terrors of World War II. Guido (Benigni) is a carefree Italian Jew who drifts through life one slapstick misadventure at a time. The film opens with a raucous sequence where the car he’s riding in loses its brakes and Guido and the driver crash through a forest, careening out the other side with so many branches and leaves on the car the driver can’t really see. Guido stands up in the convertible to direct the driver and to shoo a waiting group of townspeople out of the way. The waiting townspeople are actually expecting a visit from the King’s motorcade, and they mistake Guido’s Hitler salute-esque gestures to clear the roadway for a greeting from their monarch. Guido passes through the town an unwitting conquering hero, and as the real King’s car approaches, he finds the entire town’s backside turned to him. This sort of gentle comedic touch is what informs much of the first half of Life is Beautiful.

Life is Beautiful introduces its political element in subtle ways like the mistaken salute which offers some laughs early on. We see posters iconizing Il Duce, and in one of the best sequences, the patrician mother of Guido's soon to be wife Dora almost sexually swoons over German children’s ability to do the intricate math to work out how much the State can save by killing its infirm and disadvantaged. This is a sequence which also serves to up the romantic ante between Guido and Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), who soon thereafter becomes Guido’s wife, despite the fact that she’s not Jewish and comes from an upper crust family. (Braschi is Benigni’s real life spouse). That rather languorous prelude plays out like the relative calm before the storm, especially when Guido and Dora’s domesticity is appended by the addition of an adorable son, Giosuè (the remarkable Giorgio Cantarini, who deserved an Oscar nomination at least as much as did Benigni). Things come crashing down on Giosuè’s fourth birthday when the boy and his father are rounded up to be interned at a concentration camp. A distraught Dora insists she be allowed to come also, despite not being Jewish, in order to keep the family together.

That sets up the second half of the film, where Guido is able to secret Giosuè into the adult quarters and keeps him hidden from the camp guards by telling the young boy that everything he’s witnessing is an elaborate game which will garner the winner a tank. Guido’s desperate attempts to protect his son are the heart and soul of Life is Beautiful and Benigni’s inherent joyfulness plays in perfect counterpoint to the horrors going on around his character. The film is both literally and figuratively told from the Giosuè’s point of view, and that helps sustain the film’s detachment from reality. This may indeed be fantasy, in that childlike wonder sort of way, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t believable.

Part of Life is Beautiful’s wonderfully wrought dialectic is the fact that even though we’re witnessing events through the naïve and innocent eyes of Giosuè, we know what’s really going on, and that makes Guido’s efforts to entertain his son all the more touching. Benigni is a life sized carnival of outsized gestures and emotions in many of his interactions with Giosuè, but there’s also something inherently human-scaled about his performance, and that is much of what is so powerful about Life is Beautiful. To make a wistful semi-comedy about the Holocaust is indeed audacious enough, but to walk a tightrope between so many tonal elements, and to do it so flawlessly, is Benigni’s, and ultimately the film’s, greatest triumph.

Life Is Beautiful Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Life is Beautiful is presented on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The film has never been abundantly sharp from its theatrical exhibition onward through various home media releases, and while the Blu-ray is certainly a major step upward in clarity and precision, some videophiles with unrealistic expectations may be distressed by the overall softness of this release. The film is also somewhat muted in its color palette a lot of the time, with only occasional bursts of hue, like the green horse or some reds in costumes, offering real pop and deep saturation. Flesh tones are especially anemic, as they have been in previous home video releases. There is some minor digital noise in a couple of sequences, notably the mist strewn opening. Otherwise compression artifacts are kept to a minimum, and overall Life is Beautiful while not overwhelmingly brilliant in its high definition debut, certainly looks solid and appealing, with very good fine detail and well above average clarity and consistency.

Life Is Beautiful Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Life is Beautiful's lossless Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix has a lot to recommend it if, as with the image quality, viewers (and listeners) come to the film with appropriate expectations. This is not a soundtrack bursting at the seams with sonic activity or surround indulgence. Instead, it's a remarkably quiet film a lot of the time, as befits Benigni's almost quasi-mime physical comedy approach to his character. We do get some great discrete effects from the first brakeless car sequence onward, and the large courtyard of the concentration camp allows for some very fulsome ambience and nice directionality with regard to both dialogue and sound effects. The Oscar winning score by Nicola Piovani also sounds wonderful, though its slightness (no doubt intentional) may bother some who want something more emotionally yearning than Piovani's deliberately whimsical approach. Dialogue is clear and crisp and well prioritized in the mix, fidelity is strong, and the track sounds very good, albeit somewhat limited in scope and dynamic range.

Life Is Beautiful Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Life Beautiful (SD; 23:27) is a nice little made for television enterprise that promoted the film after its international awards triumphs. The featurette shows Benigni on set, directing and acting, and features some good, albeit PR-heavy, information.
• Academy Award Television Commercials (SD; 5:20) are the spots that ran after the Oscars. Benigni's chair-dance is not included, sadly.
• Theatrical Trailer (SD; 2:04)

Life Is Beautiful Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Like little Giosuè in Life is Beautiful, I, too, am the product of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, so I feel (rightly or wrongly) uniquely qualified to pass judgment on films which approach subjects like the Holocaust or more generally films with a religious subtext. That this film should address such serious subjects with such an ostensibly cavalier attitude might seem to be objectionable, at least on its face, but this film is such a wonderfully wrought little gem that it manages to extract more pure human emotion out of the tragedy of what happened to Jews (and, frankly, non-Jews) in World War II than any number of more "serious" efforts. Benigni is superb on screen, but perhaps more importantly, his sure handed direction keeps this film remarkably well balanced between its dramatic subtext and its comedic, albeit wistful, surface. Highly recommended.