Movies with Meaning — Life is Beautiful

Between October 2017 and June 2018, I published weekly posts of three Movies with Meaning. The full list of movies over that time is featured here. Since June 2018 I have chosen to publish a post about movies only as the spirit takes me.

As I write this post today, it comes from having just received a message from a friend that inspires me to write about this movie, Life is Beautiful, or as the Italian title goes, La vita è bella.

La vita è bella

Life is beautiful. Children constantly act as a reminder to me of that.

I love art. I love music. I love architecture. I love nature. More than any of that beauty though, I am insatiably curious and always inspired by people, none more so than my three sons.

Now for an admission about the movie. I watched it nearly twenty years ago when it first came out, and have not been able to watch it since.

It is an uplifting movie about how there can be beauty even in the deepest and darkest suffering, and beauty flows from love, and in particular love for one’s child.

Why, then, that I’ve not been able to watch it since that first viewing? At that time the age of the son in the movie was about the same age as my oldest son was then. Watching the father in the movie create a virtual and beautiful world for his son in the midst of terrifying darkness was therefore so visceral for me that I have not been able to revisit it.