Life is Beautiful

It is sometimes difficult to see the beauty in life. The daily news is often overrun by horrors—natural catastrophes, man-made disasters, and instances of human desperation and depravity. Physicians confront increasing workloads, decreasing joy in practice, and ever more uncertain prospects for the future of medicine. Sometimes, it can get pretty ugly. At such times, it is especially important that we reawaken our capacity to appreciate the beauty around us.

The stage for one of the most endearing films of recent decades, 1997’s Life is Beautiful , was set by one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Man’s Search for Meaning . In the latter, neurologist and psychoanalyst Victor Frankl tells the stories of prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Frankl argues that human beings can find meaning in even the most wretched circumstances, and he proposes a novel approach he dubs logotherapy to unlock this power.

Life is Beautiful —cowritten by, directed by, and starring Roberto Benigni—tells the story of a man with an eye for beauty and a way with words. Guido Orefice is a Jewish Italian who comes to the city; finds a woman, woos, and marries her; fathers a child; and then draws on his fertile imagination to protect his family from the brutality of a German concentration camp. The film received Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language film and Best Actor, becoming the highest grossing Italian film ever.

Life is Beautiful depicts logotherapy in action. As it opens, Guido is just arriving in town to take a job as a waiter with his uncle, who teaches him that it is possible to serve without becoming a slave. Up until this point, Guido has gone through life in a happy-go-lucky way, but now he begins to see the importance of committing to the service of others. It is in such service—first as a waiter, later in his career as a bookseller, and finally as a husband and father—that Guido comes fully to life.

He has a series of chance meetings with a local school teacher, Dora (played by Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni’s wife), a privileged young woman who captivates him immediately. In their first meeting, she jumps from a window and falls into his arms, fleeing a wasp that stung her thigh. With no pause to ask her consent, Guido immediately sets to work sucking out the venom. Repeatedly, good things come to him from above, and he uses them to remove life’s sting.

Guido is a careful observer of all that goes on around him, and he uses his fertile imagination to weave the threads of disconnected narratives into a new and vibrant story. Each day, a woman named Maria throws her house key down to her husband; Guido has been exchanging riddles with a local physician, the latest of which has the solution seven seconds; and Guido keeps switching hats with a local businessman. One night, wooing Dora, he seizes on each of these seeming irrelevancies to convince her that their love is meant to be:

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Life is Beautiful

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