'Life is Beautiful' Blog

The film Life is beautiful and the memoir Night has many similarities as well as many differences. An example of how they are similar were some of the events, the fact that both in the book and film the main characters and other Jews received a warning of some sort of what was coming. In Night their warning was Moche the Beadle, a character who was a foreign Jew that was taken by the Nazis. Moshe was able to escape from the slaughter that the Nazis were doing with Jews. Afterwards  he wanted everyone to the atrocities he saw being committed towards Jews by these men known as the Nazis. Unfortunately no one believed him, they let their positive thinking get in the way from taking Moshe the Beadle’s story and trying to figure out if it was true or not. In the film Life if Beautiful they too had a warning. The Nazis spray painted the white horse of the uncle of Guido with green paint and wrote “Danger, Jewish horse” in German, Guido was a positive man that didn't pay no mind to the warning.
          Life is Beautiful and Night didn't only have similarities they as well had differences. For example in the film Guido had made up a game for his son as they were going to the work camp. Guido basically made his son believe that they were going there as a vacation and that if they stayed there they would earn 1000 points and that would get them a tank. Of course the child believed it. Guido found a way to make his child avoid being traumatized by the camp itself. But in the memoir, Elie and his father were already older so they just took in the reality of being prisoners of the work camps.
          The mood was very different but at the same time it was the same. In the movie the main character from Life is Beautiful, Guido, made the film have humor. The reason why he used humor was to not make his son, Giosué, feel frightened in the camp. Not only did he add humor to the film but he also gave hope along with the humor which was a bit refreshing. Unlike in the book, Night, there wasn't any humor at all. It was all very serious and a bit depressing. But then again the film was all fiction and the book was a memoir of a Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. The similarity though was the sorrow that was seen in both. At the end of the film Guino dies trying to keep his child safe and in the movie Elie’s father dies, the last family Elie had.
       Even though the end of the film Life is Beautiful was very sorrowful there was some parts within the movie that really did show how beautiful life is. For instance some part during the middle of the movie there was a party in which Dora was announced to be engaged to a man when all of a sudden Guino comes in with a horse and basically asks Dora to go with him. She accepts and they have a child. I found this part really beautiful because Dora fell in love with Guino and left what she had for him while Guino really obtained what he wanted, to be loved by Dora. The best part was the fact that they had a baby which gave the audience the feeling that they would have a happily ever. Another event that I found beautiful was when Guino and his son were in the camp and Guino made up a game for his son. He told made him think that they were there to earn a prize. Guino did everything in his power to keep his son from suffering. It caught my attention because Guino was willing to do anything to keep his son from finding out what was really happening in those camps.