Stories From the Silver Screen: Life Is Beautiful

If it is finally love that moves the sun and the stars, to sound the great trumpet blast struck seven centuries ago by Dante Alighieri, along with every planet here below, then we must see such love at work, always and everywhere, even amid the hardship and the horror of our lives. We mustn’t shrink before the logic implicit in such a claim, for all our happiness will depend on the truth of it. The sheer universality of its appeal, in other words, is not anything to be ashamed of, or to be hesitant about, but that the truth about love, and its application across the board, should urge us all the more to insist that here is the defining principle of the universe, immanent therefore to all that lies within the world we live in and are constrained to love. Life, all life, truly is beautiful. Yes, even when it leaves us seemingly helpless on the inside of a concentration camp.

All this we believe because it is true, not that it becomes true because we believe it. To behave otherwise is to countenance a kind of solipsism, in which the world becomes no more than an extension of the self, whose judgments alone determine what is real. There are no facts, only the fantasies we construct about a universe wholly bereft of meaning. We just make it all up as we go along.

And, by the way, it really wasn’t Dante who first made the discovery, seizing upon an idea that had no earlier source to give it expression. To be sure, he gave it sublime artistic expression in an epic poem that will live forever, namely, “The Divine Comedy,” numbered among the enduring monuments of Western literature. A poem, incidentally, which ends well. Why else call it a comedy? In any case, it was God who first came up with the idea, inspiring one of the sacred writers, St. John the Divine, to set it down in chapter four, verse sixteen, of his first letter:

God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

And so we have all been loved by this self-same love into life, never mind how perilous the place may be in which we find ourselves. Whether it be an apparent paradise or an obvious prison, God is no less present in the one than He is in the other. And what He does not assume, to cite the teaching of the Church Fathers, He cannot redeem. Nothing human, then, can be alien to God. The meaning of life is not that it abruptly ends, as Kafka would say, followed by an endless void in which everything gets vaporized. “Not everyone can see this truth,” he adds, not realizing that he has gotten hold of the wrong truth because, to rework a line from Viktor Frankl, it is only when a man loses everything in life except life that he may discover the one thing that will enable him to survive life, which is the meaning he is left with in order to make sense of it. And what is another word for that meaning but Logos—God—who is nothing other than love!

Just in case, dear reader, you hadn’t noticed, such is the governing idea behind the film I’ve chosen to discuss this week, one which won over sixty international awards, including an Academy Award for Best Actor (Roberto Benigni, who directed and co-wrote the screenplay), Best Foreign Language Film, and Best Original Score. A good year (1999), you might say, to be an Italian. And, of course, only an Italian could have possibly made a movie so captivatingly comedic, so wonderfully, exuberantly operatic as “Life Is Beautiful.”

If you don’t believe me, just ask the then pope, John Paul II, who sat down one afternoon with Signor Benigni, along with a handful of Cardinals and ten delighted nuns, to watch the whole thing, exclaiming afterwards how profoundly moved he was by it.

Of course, the movie isn’t finally about a so-called idea of love as though that were the organizing principle to explain the meaning of the experience. No, what gives shape to the story is not Something, but rather Someone, a person concretely incarnate in the human being Jesus, who moves through all the details of the story, however unseen, because He had first come down among us to suffer and to die.

“Not only had Being (Beauty, Truth) not disdained to clothe its perfection in flesh,” writes Servant of God Luigi Giussani, “not only had it not disdained to bear the toils of this human life, but it had come to die for me.” Indeed, to enter so deeply into the brokenness, the sheer awfulness of our fallen estate, that He makes Himself present even to the inmates at Auschwitz and all those other places of death. He is certainly there with Guido and his wife and son, who have been forced into an impossible situation and yet, through the magic of this movie, manage to vanquish the darkness.

How Signor Benigni pulls this off is the whole point of the film, the sheer enchantment of which cannot be stated in a review, but only seen and marveled at on a screen. But I will say this much, that there are many moments of both side-splitting hilarity and genuine heartbreak throughout the film. One will weep either way, whether in sadness or in joy, and not regret the flow of tears, however copious. But the last bits are almost unbearable. Yet, such is the skill and the vision shown in the telling that one leaves the theater filled with a sense of triumph because, in the end, God has found a way to redeem all our losses.

“We won! We won!” cries the little boy, who in telling the story of his own father’s sacrifice, made in order to ensure his victory, is also telling us, in a most mysterious and unwitting way, of Another’s sacrifice, that of God the Father of us all, made through the blood freely shed by His own Son to ensure an entire world’s salvation.

“A thousand points! Couldn’t you just die laughing? We came in first! We get to take the tank home! We won!”