The Tiger and the Snow

Written & Directed by Roberto Benigni

Laughter during wartime breeds discontent. Case in point: Italian funnyman Roberto Benigni’s latest outing as writer-director-star of The Tiger and the Snow, tells a quirky love story set immediately after the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. It has Benigni’s sweet comedic sensibility and unpretentious soul, but delivers a jolt to common sense and softens the brutality of this latest overseas incursion into fantastical fluff.

To be fair, Benigni isn’t trying to dull the impact of warfare, but he takes advantage of it in his own naive way. After snagging the Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 1997 for his comic Holocaust fable Life is Beautiful, the versatile performer professed his desire to make love to every member of the audience—evidence of his conviction that inner joy provides redemption from epic tragedy. With The Tiger and the Snow, Benigni aims to deliver the same message, but the simpleminded storytelling overwhelms the brutal backdrop. He comes across as unintentionally facetious, undone by his own innocence.

Although Life is Beautiful should be held accountable for associating trite sentimentalism with the Holocaust, at the very least it manages to acknowledge the death and destruction of concentration camps with visceral impact (the camp is shown as a caricature, but the piles of bodies are not).

Benigni’s new film, in contrast, treats the Iraq war almost as an afterthought. It starts out promising—with Benigni in fine form as Attilio, an inspired poet living in Rome. When not delivering rousing college lectures on the mechanics of prose composition, he dreams of a spirited wedding to his mysterious, fantasy soulmate while Tom Waits croons at the piano. In short order, Attilio fills in the blank from the dream, discovering a gorgeous woman around campus named Vittoria (Benigni’s real-world love Nicoletta Braschi), and attempts to woo her with his bumbling charm. The trick doesn’t work, and soon the gal is in a war zone collaborating with an Iraqi poet. When Attilio hears that she’s been hospitalized in the aftermath of heavy bombardment, he blithely sneaks into Iraq himself as her savior. Once there, the movie turns into a series of vignettes as Attilio navigates a minefield, ignorant American troops and a generally vapid plot.

With his slender form and reliance on slapstick, Benigni is most frequently compared to Charlie Chaplin, who seemed to grasp the details of authentic catastrophe with much more subtlety. Benigni avoids being so subversive. There aren’t any moments in The Tiger and the Snow when the mood darkens to match the nature of its setting. Sticking to what he knows, Benigni bites off more than he can chew—or, to borrow an archaic catch phrase, he stays the course.