In all these ways Fateless avoids the romantic mistakes of Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002) in which the filmmakers expect us to be swept away by the travails of their exceptional Jewish hero, who escapes from a forced-work detail and goes into hiding in a vacant apartment, only to be trapped there after his protector stops bringing supplies. What many critics considered the high point — when the famished concert pianist moves his fingers precisely but soundlessly over a keyboard, trying to hang on to what made his pre-War life meaningful — I found downright tacky. The fact that a victim of the Nazis is a great pianist doesn't make his suffering meaningfully worse or different. And the Holocaust doesn't need poetic heightening, any more than it needed the gaudy melodramatic heightening of the mother forced to choose which of her two children would go straight to the gas chamber in Sophie's Choice (1982).

Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful

These are all reasons why I skipped Life Is Beautiful (1997) — I don't want to be asked to admire the specialness of someone's Holocaust experience. I watched the movie recently, however, and I have to say, if you're going to get the Holocaust wrong, this is the way to do it.

Benigni plays Guido Orefice, a Jewish-Italian waiter in the late 1930s who is a romantic clown. A classic slapstick protagonist to the extent of constantly getting into scrapes, Guido has the gift of turning every hitch in his experience to advantage. Mishaps aren't humiliating to Guido, as they were to the perpetual adolescents played by Harold Lloyd, because Benigni attributes the physical resourcefulness of the silent slapstick actors to Guido himself. This gives the character a buoyancy that allows him to make life a never-ending acrobatic stunt in which he just keeps shifting and persisting — and talking — until he lands on his feet. Benigni is not a great physical performer but he is peskily winning, and no slapstick star of feature films since Raymond Griffith has had less of a penchant for sad-clown masochism, which is key to his pulling off this Holocaust comedy.

As a director Benigni thinks of setting in terms of potential gags, involving bicycles, house keys, hats, eggs, steering wheels, i.e., standard slapstick props, and he runs the gags together with a craftsmanlike fluency not seen since the silent days (with the exception of Jacques Tati). At the same time, as a star Benigni has the winsomeness of the perpetual juveniles Lloyd and Keaton but also some of Chaplin's least sentimental qualities. In a scene in which Guido talks a patron who entered the restaurant after the kitchen was closed into ordering a meal that's already been prepared, for instance, he shows the aplomb of the guttersnipe Chaplin seizing opportunity; at other times he is sparky with Chaplin's effrontery in refusing to take bureaucratic or police power seriously. In addition, Benigni has a motormouth on him that gives him some of Jerry Lewis's sheer force. All the influences come together in a scruffy, unsinkable goofball who can believably win the beautiful, wealthy, gentile schoolteacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) from her pompous-bureaucrat fiancé. Guido calls Dora "principessa" and summons all the alertness, brass, and luck at his command to make her realize how magical she appears through his eyes. Guido himself is not much to look at but you can see why Dora can't resist him.