Guido must make Giosue believe that they are fortunate contestants, free to leave at any time. When they arrive in a Nazi concentration camp, Guido calls upon his imagination to create an intricate and ever changing game to elude Giosue. Not only must he shield his innocent son, Giosue, from the atrocities of the Holocaust, he must use creativity to save his son’s life. And in Life is Beautiful it is Guido’s creative strength of character that is put to the ultimate test. Positive psychologists also indicate that crises can reveal strengths of character. What happens next morphs into the unspeakable world of death camps. Life is beautiful.īut as positive psychologist Christopher Peterson lamented, “so many of the activities that make life most worth living involve others, and they do not always cooperate.” In this case, that’s a huge understatement because Guido’s bookstore “customers” are none other than the Nazis who are marching into town, and they certainly aren’t cooperating. Using his strength of creativity Guido eventually wins the heart of Dora. And like the Lone Ranger, he playfully and creatively whisks Dora away from her engagement party riding nothing other than a white horse covered in anti-Semitic insults. He makes creative jokes that diminish fascist bullies. He impersonates a school inspector to impress her.
The film begins on a light note showing Guido using his strength of creativity to win the heart of Dora. People who have strong creative strengths often generate ideas or behaviors that are novel or unusual ways of doing things and these can be seen as making a positive contribution to not only their lives but often to the lives of others.Ĭreativity often takes different forms and Life is Beautiful is a wonderful example of this. Many believe there are two essential components to creativity: originality and adaptiveness. Each of these aspects, particularly hope and humor, play intricate roles in Life is Beautiful, but it is Guido’s creativity that is most salient.
For example: social intelligence, fairness, hope, and humor. The VIA Institute of Character places creativity under the virtue of wisdom because strengths in the classification have cognitive aspects. In the language of positive psychology, wisdom deals with strengths that involve the way we acquire and use knowledge. Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful ( La Vita È Bella, 1997) is a great film to revisit if you’re looking to engage in the virtue of wisdom and the character strength of creativity. When I’m in the mood to rewatch an old film, I almost always follow the advice of psychologists Ryan Niemiec and Danny Wedding and make my selection not so much by the film’s actors or plot, but rather by the virtues and character strengths found in the movie’s subplots. “ No art passes our conscience the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” - Ingmar Bergman A Positive Psychology Film Review