Because the entire movie -not only the concentration camp part- is showing us what Guido tells himself and his son to be reality, if we had been shown any of the horrors Guido is so insistant on telling himself aren't there, it would have sort of lost its point.
That's what I think makes the whole thing kind of pointless to me. If this glorious story Dad is telling can't hold up against the reality (which another story could) then why would I believe it worked? What's it saying, exactly? I know at least a bit about what would have really been going on, so my focus was never on the story Guido was telling Joshua, but the story the director was telling me. I had more questions than Joshua. It seemed like it would be saying that if a concentration was just a lot less horrible you could pretend it was a game. If we were dealing with the reality, for instance, could we really believe a child would choose to stay in, say, Sobibor? What kid wouldn't want to go home?
I mean, the beginning of the movie had more reality in it, like a sign that said, "No Jews or dogs allowed in store." The stuff that happened did happen to some extent--He did marry Dora, they did have a child etc. It didn't change the sign to say something else. When the Nazi gives them instructions that Guido pretends to translate we understand that he's really saying something else. But what was the reality? It didn't know what exactly to see underneath, since the storyline often depended on the place conforming to make Guido's schemes work.
So, like, it didn't seem to me that it was choosing to be "not real" so much as trying to be real in a half-assed way, skimming over the question of how this stuff could happen. I mean, to me it seems a lot harder to write a convincing scene where an inmate of a concentration manages to break into a guarded watchtower and make a very long announcement on the PA without any guard getting in to stop him (it's not like they don't know where he is) and then get out again than it is to have him do that and just rely on the audience to fill in that this could be dangerous in a real camp and assume he did it somehow. In a real camp it would be an amazing thing to do for his wife and probably get him and others killed. In this camp it was just business as usual. So I went by the reality of this camp where you knew dad couldn't die until the story demanded it. I wasn't scared for him until the scene where he was obviously going to die. So there was no tension for me, it was just sort of watching this guy flit around his little camp doing one cute thing after another while the guards were kind of slow. And then when it was time in the story he died.
It's not like Guido was particularly clever, after all. For instance, when he pretends to be the school inspector he gets away with it because the real inspector stands there and says nothing until he makes his mistake. Then later the Nazis appear just as obligingly ineffectual.
I see what you're saying about the father being morally ambiguous, though I thought the movie clearly thought what he did was good. And I didn't think in the end that reality won, thus showing that Guido had made the wrong choice. The title seems strange to me, because for someone to say "Life is Beautiful" with any real weight I think they would have had to have found beauty in a concentration camp. Not just convinced their kid he was in a sort of reality-tv show competition. (And btw, if you've ever seen real kids in those shows you'd know Joshua would not have been so compliant.)
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Re: Cont.
Date: 2004-08-14 08:37 pm (UTC)That's what I think makes the whole thing kind of pointless to me. If this glorious story Dad is telling can't hold up against the reality (which another story could) then why would I believe it worked? What's it saying, exactly? I know at least a bit about what would have really been going on, so my focus was never on the story Guido was telling Joshua, but the story the director was telling me. I had more questions than Joshua. It seemed like it would be saying that if a concentration was just a lot less horrible you could pretend it was a game. If we were dealing with the reality, for instance, could we really believe a child would choose to stay in, say, Sobibor? What kid wouldn't want to go home?
I mean, the beginning of the movie had more reality in it, like a sign that said, "No Jews or dogs allowed in store." The stuff that happened did happen to some extent--He did marry Dora, they did have a child etc. It didn't change the sign to say something else. When the Nazi gives them instructions that Guido pretends to translate we understand that he's really saying something else. But what was the reality? It didn't know what exactly to see underneath, since the storyline often depended on the place conforming to make Guido's schemes work.
So, like, it didn't seem to me that it was choosing to be "not real" so much as trying to be real in a half-assed way, skimming over the question of how this stuff could happen. I mean, to me it seems a lot harder to write a convincing scene where an inmate of a concentration manages to break into a guarded watchtower and make a very long announcement on the PA without any guard getting in to stop him (it's not like they don't know where he is) and then get out again than it is to have him do that and just rely on the audience to fill in that this could be dangerous in a real camp and assume he did it somehow. In a real camp it would be an amazing thing to do for his wife and probably get him and others killed. In this camp it was just business as usual. So I went by the reality of this camp where you knew dad couldn't die until the story demanded it. I wasn't scared for him until the scene where he was obviously going to die. So there was no tension for me, it was just sort of watching this guy flit around his little camp doing one cute thing after another while the guards were kind of slow. And then when it was time in the story he died.
It's not like Guido was particularly clever, after all. For instance, when he pretends to be the school inspector he gets away with it because the real inspector stands there and says nothing until he makes his mistake. Then later the Nazis appear just as obligingly ineffectual.
I see what you're saying about the father being morally ambiguous, though I thought the movie clearly thought what he did was good. And I didn't think in the end that reality won, thus showing that Guido had made the wrong choice. The title seems strange to me, because for someone to say "Life is Beautiful" with any real weight I think they would have had to have found beauty in a concentration camp. Not just convinced their kid he was in a sort of reality-tv show competition. (And btw, if you've ever seen real kids in those shows you'd know Joshua would not have been so compliant.)