La tigre e la neve

Benigni can’t win them all, I guess. I rented this mostly on a shared recommendation with La vita é bella, but ended up getting a lot less out of it. Some of it may have been the surrealism: Benigni’s dreams with a kangaroo and Tom Waits don’t do much to make the real scenes seem real. Some may have been the setting shift: at this point in time, anything set in Iraq seems all-too-suffused with the political. And some may have just been the changes in characters: a clownish hero trying to preserve a child’s innocence is a just plain more meaty dynamic than a clowing hero assuring an adult woman in a coma that everything’s going to be alright. Not that The Tiger and the Snow is a bad movie, but, y’know, it wasn’t up to the level of dazzling brilliance I expected.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.