“Life is Beautiful,” 13 March 1999, theater. Sentimental comedy about the power of love, humor, and faith. Comic actor, writer, director Roberto Benigni places Italian Jews in concentration camp. Assimilated Italian Jew woos and wins Italian Catholic girl about to marry pompous bureaucrat. Their loving marriage produces a wonderful child until father and son are sent to the camps. The wife follows. The wife and son survive as the father constructs an elaborate fantasy about the camps as a game and sustains his wife by goofing on the camp sound system. Too kind and upbeat. They would have just shot him and others outright. Sad but not overblown ending, still upbeat about survival. Benigni is sometimes funny and there are all sorts of homages to Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, WC Fields, and others. The best part is a brilliant and terrifying interaction between Benigni and the camp SS doctor who he had known and befriended before the war That section alone is wonderful in its portrayal of banality. Yet the film is unsatisfying in its happiness. Unfortunately, love, humor and faith do not conquer all. The camp’s smoke tragically attest to that. A film torn in its ambivalence of attitude, experience, and ending.