COMEDY

POLITICS 117Gilman’s view of Benigni’s film is quite different. Life is Beautifulends with the liberation of the camps by the US army, and Joshua, thelittle boy who has been saved from brutality by his father’s protectivefiction, is hauled up onto a tank by a friendly soldier, just as his fatherpredicted. In the concluding deus ex machina that also enables Joshua tobe reunited with his mother, Gilman accuses Benigni of reducing thetopic to fit the demands of form, as ‘Benigni’s promise is that there areno accidents, that at the end of the comedy the gods in the machine willarrive to resolve the action and rescue those in danger’ (Gilman, 2000:304). In the ultimate imposition of comic form, the imperative to fascistinhumanity is overridden: ‘Benigni’s laughter is proof that whateverelse will happen the promise of the film, the rescue of the child, musttake place. Our expectations are fulfilled, and we feel good about ourlaughter’ (Gilman, 2000:304).The three Oscars and huge box office success of Life is Beautifulmade it the biggest Italian film in history, and it has probably been seenby tens of millions of people since its release in 1998 (Ezrahi, 2001:292). For its supporters, Benigni has produced an important recognitionof Italy’s participation in the deportation of Jews, and told a fable ofselfless love and the ability of the spirit to resist the most appallingoppression. The worst accusations levelled at it insist that it is sanitized,fabricated, dishonest, and ‘a whitewash of European guilt’ (Ezrahi,2001:295). In his review of the film published in the November 1998issue of Time magazine, Richard Shickel argued that the comicframework of the film amounted to an insult to the actual witnesses ofthe Holocaust, writing that ‘its living victims…inevitably grow fewereach year. The voices that would deny it ever took place remainstrident. In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century’scentral horror into feel-good entertainment is abhorrent. Sentimentalityis a kind of fascism too’ (quoted in Flanzbaum, 2001:281). A similardegree of outrage was expressed by David Denby in The New Yorker,who accused Benigni of wanting ‘the authority of the Holocaust withoutthe actuality’ and of ‘feeling relieved and happy that Life is Beautiful isa benign form of Holocaust denial’ (quoted in Flanzbaum, 2001:282). Itis easy to see comic structure as a primary cause of this distaste, coupledwith the fact that it was devised and performed by a non-Jewishcomedian, making the film open to accusations of careless optimismand inauthenticity. Rather than seeking to define some truth of theHolocaust and Italy’s part in it, the film provides only easy comicsolutions and belief in a Christianized conception of absolution, ‘thecomic as artificial human construct of the universe as it should be’