Life Is Beautiful

     A movie that we watched during class, about the Holocaust, was Life Is Beautiful. It was about this man named Guido, who happened to be Jewish, who falls in love with a woman named Dora, who wasn't Jewish. I am going to try to summarize everything, so that you know the basics of what happend in the movie. Guido and Dora have a son named Giosue, who loved dearly by both of his parents. Since this movie is set when the Holocaust was happening and Guido was Jewish, the Nazis came for him. When they took him away to a camp, he was with his son and he kept on asking where they were going. In order to make his son not feel worried or scared, he started telling him jokes and saying that it was all game that they had to win. Even though Dora isn't Jewish, she wanted to be with her family so she also got on the train to go to the camp. This movie is basically about how Guido and Dora fall in love and start a family, but also about how all three of them do the impossible to continue to be together but as well as for all of them to survive.
     Since this movie has something to do with the Holocaust, it does have some aspects that are similar to the real thing. The events that happened in the movie that also happened in the real Holocaust was how they would the Jewish inside the trains in big amounts. Another thing was similar was when they got off the train and they separated the women from the men and categorized everyone from age. Those that were dubbed to young to work or too old were told that they were going to go take showers, but were actually sent to their deaths in gas chambers. Another thing that happened in both was when those who were old but young enough to work were analyzed, to see if they could work by Nazi doctors. One major thing that I found different or thought that couldn't really happen was the freedom they had in the camp. In some scenes you could see Guido and Giosue walking around the camp after hours and no guard catching them. I found it odd because based off what we read and learned about the Holocaust, it seemed as if you couldn't just walk wherever you wanted whenever you wanted. Another thing that I think was different was the help Guido got from a Nazi doctor, who before the Holocaust Guido actually worked for. I knew that in ghettos some people would pay Nazis to let them escape, but in the movie Guido didn't pay anyone and yet the doctor helped because he knew him. It may have been possible but I haven't read anything saying something like what happened in the movie actually happened in real life. Those were just some of the similarities and differences the movie had with the Holocaust, there are some more but I just stated those as few examples.
     In this movie, there are different characters that gave the movie a different tone from others. Guido gave the movie a humorous tone. Even when they got sent to the camp, he would use humor to comfort his son. Dora in the first half of the movie had a humorous tone because there wasn't anything happening that would make her mood turn to suspenseful. The second half of the movie, she has a more suspenseful mood because you didn't see a whole lot of what was happening with her. Another character that gave the second half a humorous mood was Giosue. Since his father made him think that the reason they were in the camp was because of a game, he didn't know what was happening so it lightened the mood. Sometimes his presence in some scenes would give the movie a suspenseful tone because you weren't sure if he was going to get caught or not.
     Life is shown as beautiful throughout the film because it shows how everything was so simple, and as the Holocaust continued to happen families continued to try to be together and survive. This shows that they cared more about their families than anything else. An example of that was when Dora told the Nazi soldier to stop the train because she was going to get in it. Even though she wasn't Jewish, she risked her life just to maybe see her family one more time. An example of how everything was so simple in the film was before the Holocaust. When Guido and Dora were falling in love it seemed as if the only thing that was important was their love and them being together. Everything they did when they met were very simple and humorous. It didn't seem as complicated as most things seem now today.