Self - Anchor
Tony Dokoupil
Self - Anchor
CBS Evening News
4.9
1961
66 Seasons • 1908 Episodes
News
Overview
The CBS Evening News is the flagship daily evening television news program of CBS News, the news division of the CBS television network in the United States. The network has broadcast the program since 1948, and has used the CBS Evening News title since 1963.
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Reviews
✦ AI-generated review
Playing Games in the Dark
Say the premise of *Life Is Beautiful* out loud and it still sounds like a dare. An Italian goofball uses slapstick and fantasy to protect his son from the reality of a Nazi concentration camp. That should be a catastrophe of bad taste. Benigni somehow makes it breathe. The movie lays down its own rules right away with a voiceover: "This is a simple story, but not an easy one to tell. Like a fable, there is sorrow, and like a fable, it is full of wonder and happiness."
What follows really is two different movies stitched together. The first half plays like a sunlit screwball romance in 1930s Arezzo. Guido (Benigni) is a Jewish bookshop owner with a rubber face and enough energy to wear out everyone in the room as he tries to win over Dora, a wealthy schoolteacher. (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife, gives Dora the sort of bemused patience that keeps all of Guido’s chaos from floating away.) Benigni films himself like some lost Marx brother, tripping over furniture, dropping eggs on bureaucrats, and spinning elaborate coincidences into courtship. It’s broad stuff, maybe broader than it needs to be, but it serves a purpose. It teaches you that Guido’s real tool is imagination.
Then the air goes out of the room. It’s 1944. Guido, his uncle, and his young son Giosuè (Giorgio Cantarini) are shoved onto a train. Once they reach the camp, Guido understands that he can’t protect his son from what is happening in any literal way, so he tries to protect the boy’s mind instead. He tells Giosuè the camp is one big contest. First prize: a real tank. The rules? Don’t cry, don’t ask for your mother, don’t complain about being hungry. Janet Maslin of *The New York Times* was right to call the whole thing audacious, noting that Benigni made something "miraculously lighthearted even while it deals with the darkest of subjects." I wouldn’t call it lighthearted, though. Under every grin, you can feel panic sweating through.
The translation scene is still the movie’s nerve center. A German officer barges into the barracks and starts barking out the camp rules. Guido, who doesn’t speak a word of German, jumps in to “translate” for the prisoners. While the officer screams about punishment and death, Guido paces around turning the whole thing into the "rules" of the game for his son. "You lose points if you cry!" he yells, mirroring the officer’s aggression while inventing nonsense on the fly. It lands as physical comedy, sure, but Benigni’s eyes give the game away. They’re huge with terror. He is improvising to keep his child alive, and he knows exactly how little room there is for error.
The film has always had detractors, and I get why. Plenty of people think putting the Holocaust next to Chaplinesque comedy inevitably sands down the horror. If you want a sober historical recreation of the camps, this is not that movie. But *Life Is Beautiful* isn’t pretending to be history class. It’s about the stories parents spin when the truth would destroy a child. By the time Guido does that final absurd little march out of his son’s sight line, nothing about it feels playful anymore. The joke is gone. What remains is the full, crushing force of a father’s love wearing comedy like camouflage.
Say the premise of *Life Is Beautiful* out loud and it still sounds like a dare. An Italian goofball uses slapstick and fantasy to protect his son from the reality of a Nazi concentration camp. That should be a catastrophe of bad taste. Benigni somehow makes it breathe. The movie lays down its own rules right away with a voiceover: "This is a simple story, but not an easy one to tell. Like a fable, there is sorrow, and like a fable, it is full of wonder and happiness."
What follows really is two different movies stitched together. The first half plays like a sunlit screwball romance in 1930s Arezzo. Guido (Benigni) is a Jewish bookshop owner with a rubber face and enough energy to wear out everyone in the room as he tries to win over Dora, a wealthy schoolteacher. (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's real-life wife, gives Dora the sort of bemused patience that keeps all of Guido’s chaos from floating away.) Benigni films himself like some lost Marx brother, tripping over furniture, dropping eggs on bureaucrats, and spinning elaborate coincidences into courtship. It’s broad stuff, maybe broader than it needs to be, but it serves a purpose. It teaches you that Guido’s real tool is imagination.
Then the air goes out of the room. It’s 1944. Guido, his uncle, and his young son Giosuè (Giorgio Cantarini) are shoved onto a train. Once they reach the camp, Guido understands that he can’t protect his son from what is happening in any literal way, so he tries to protect the boy’s mind instead. He tells Giosuè the camp is one big contest. First prize: a real tank. The rules? Don’t cry, don’t ask for your mother, don’t complain about being hungry. Janet Maslin of *The New York Times* was right to call the whole thing audacious, noting that Benigni made something "miraculously lighthearted even while it deals with the darkest of subjects." I wouldn’t call it lighthearted, though. Under every grin, you can feel panic sweating through.
The translation scene is still the movie’s nerve center. A German officer barges into the barracks and starts barking out the camp rules. Guido, who doesn’t speak a word of German, jumps in to “translate” for the prisoners. While the officer screams about punishment and death, Guido paces around turning the whole thing into the "rules" of the game for his son. "You lose points if you cry!" he yells, mirroring the officer’s aggression while inventing nonsense on the fly. It lands as physical comedy, sure, but Benigni’s eyes give the game away. They’re huge with terror. He is improvising to keep his child alive, and he knows exactly how little room there is for error.
The film has always had detractors, and I get why. Plenty of people think putting the Holocaust next to Chaplinesque comedy inevitably sands down the horror. If you want a sober historical recreation of the camps, this is not that movie. But *Life Is Beautiful* isn’t pretending to be history class. It’s about the stories parents spin when the truth would destroy a child. By the time Guido does that final absurd little march out of his son’s sight line, nothing about it feels playful anymore. The joke is gone. What remains is the full, crushing force of a father’s love wearing comedy like camouflage.