By Fr. Niall O’Brien, ssc

I hope you have seen Life is Beautiful. But in case you have not, the plot goes like this: Italy, 1939, young man falls in love, he is Jewish, she is a Catholic. Italy is in alliance with Hitler’s Germany and has been infected with German racism – seeking the pure Aryan breed, superior to everyone else. Everyone is swallowing the new ideology. Well, not everyone, Guido, our hero, laughs at it, naturally, because he is a Jew – one of the “inferior” races.

Just a Game

Well, as I said, he falls in love and he and his wife and their child end up in a train going to a concentration camp – or I should say extermination camp – in Germany where as members of an inferior race they will be liquidated. Little Joshua-it’s his birthday – demands to know what is going on. Guido explains that it is all a game; if they can obey the rules of the game they’ll get so many points and win. Follows the usual heart-breaking ordeal inside a German did extermination camp. [This is not fantasy; the Germans did exterminate six million Jews.] But this time it is made so much more poignant by the hilarious antics of Guido as he tries to convince his child to put up with the horrors because it’s all part of game; in the end he will win.

Too Much Reality

There are loads of movies made about the Holocaust. Schindler’s List for one but somehow the story is so sad we resist; it is too much for us. Human being can only take so much reality. Here, by mixing in laughter and comedy, the director Ricardo Benigni (who is the main actor and co scriptwriter with Vincenzo Cerami) actually gets the message across more deeply though I have heard that some Jewish groups were angry with the film. Well you can’t tell people how they should feel but this movie will be remembered long after other movies on the Holocaust are forgotten.

A Metaphor

I’m not going to tell you the whole story and the extraordinary twist at the end nor can I share with you the tears and the laughter; you have to see it for yourself. But I can share with you the wisdom, the metaphor, the beautiful metaphor for life that this movie is. Guido is not deceiving his son about the game. In the end we see that life is a game. We all get dealt with different hands. We do our best but we must play the hand we are dealt. Though we can pick up and discard and that’s where free will comes in. We will not be judged on the physical results but we’ll be judged on how we played the hand we were dealt. If you have become blind in mid-life, if your husband has walked out on you, if your favorite child has made a bad marriage, you still have to live as best you can with the cards you were dealt and as Guido would say, “No complaints. Life is beautiful.” It’s how you live that life that counts and the movie shows you how it is done.

He Made Life Beautiful

So winning is not in being successful. Winning is living with integrity and faithfulness and doing what is right though no one sees because you believe that He who made life made it beautiful and you trust Him that all that happens is for your good. Surely that’s what He means when He says, “Sparrows are sold for a few centavos. Not one of them falls from the sky but your Father knows it. You are worth more than many sparrows; O you of little faith!”