I finally got around to seeing Life is
Beautiful, last night.
My reaction to LIB before I
became a parent would probably have been quite different than my
reaction to it now as a parent (of a child approximately the same
age as Joshua in the film). Before being a parent, I probably
would have dismissed the film as being an entertaining failure,
as a wrong-headed treatment of the Holocaust that was nonetheless
nice to watch. As a parent, though, my sense of what the story
was saying came very much into focus, as my mind was concentrated
on the point of asking myself how I would explain things to my
daughter if we were suddenly hauled onto a train and shipped off
to a concentration camp. I think that the sheer horror of the
ordeal would be impossible to hide from my kid, but perhaps if my
will and my ability to suspend disbelief was strong enough, maybe
I could pull off something like that. I don't know. Certainly,
the love that a parent feels for his child was the
"star" of that film, and it was from this perspective
that Begnini's performance touched me very deeply.
