Rewatched Life is Beautiful today. When I was around 17, I asked my uncle, a Marine what he watches when he feels down or lost. He didn’t even pause didn’t even have to think. He said Life is Beautiful. At the time, I watched it but I don’t think I fully grasped it. My mind was still too young, maybe too untouched by life to comprehend it’s quiet ache, too cushioned to understand the quiet devastation hidden behind the laughter. I thought it was sweet, sad but now after life has carved itself into me now I really see it.
Now at 29, rewatching it hit differently. I felt it in my bones. This film isn’t just a piece of cinema. This isn’t just a movie. It’s a father’s quiet rebellion against despair. A love story in the middle of a war. A reminder that sometimes the most heroic thing you can do is protect someone’s sense of wonder even as the world around you falls apart. It’s a meditation on love in it’s purest form. On fatherhood. On the power of imagination as a shield against horror. On hope when everything around you screams despair. It’s a love letter to the human spirit. To a father’s refusal to let the world dim his child’s light. It doesn’t ask you to deny pain it simply shows you how light can still exist within it.
Watching Guido that beautiful, foolish, radiant man laugh, joke, shield his son with nothing but imagination, it broke me. It reminded me of my uncle. How he never spoke much about what he saw or lived through, but how he showed up always with strength, always with humor. Maybe this is what he was trying to teach me all those years ago. That life will not always be fair. It will hurt. It will take but it will also give. And in the middle of all of it, you still get to choose how you love. You still get to choose how you show up for the people you love. You still get to choose beauty.
Now coming to the movie Guido’s character is joy incarnate. He walks into every room with a joke, a sparkle, a story. Even when he’s thrown into unimaginable darkness, he keeps that light burning not for himself but for his son. Watching Guido smile through horror make a game out of hell protect his son’s innocence with nothing but humor and heart, it destroyed me. Not because it was sad. But because it was so full of love. That rare, boundless, unconditional kind. Sometimes surviving isn’t enough. Sometimes you have to find a way to make life feel beautiful even when it’s not.
And I finally understood why my uncle a man who had tasted darkness and still chose kindness turned to this movie. Because some people don’t survive just for themselves. They survive for the ones they love. They laugh not because they’re blind to pain but because they know sometimes laughter is the only armor we’ve got. That kind of strength the quiet, selfless kind he carried too. Maybe that’s why he loved this film so much. Maybe that’s why he wanted me to see it.
I wish I could sit with him today and tell him I finally get it. Years later, I finally get it. That I understand now what he was trying to show me back then. And I carry that with me now, a deeper understanding of what it means to love through pain, to protect with laughter and to believe in beauty when the world gives you every reason not to. That Life is Beautiful isn’t about denying suffering, it’s about choosing love anyway. Even when it’s hard. Even when it hurts.
So tonight, I sat with the version of me who was 17 and the version of me now. And we both cried. For the things we’ve seen. For the innocence we lost. And for the reminder that even in the most broken places, light still finds a way in.
So if your heart is heavy, if you feel like you’re losing grip watch this movie. Life is Beautiful. Not always. Not easily. But sometimes because someone chooses to make it so.
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