Adrian Barich: Life Is Beautiful, Dead Poets Society and Spotlight are just some movies that make you feel

West Australian

14-06-2025

Has a movie ever had an emotional impact on you?
I mean, as in, you've found yourself lying or sitting there afterwards, in silence, touched by something you've just seen. That was me last week, rewatching the 1997 movie Life Is Beautiful.
I didn't know if I was sad, happy or just simply stunned.
This was a movie that came out at the turn of the century, which was so powerful that I thought about it for days after I watched it again.
When I first saw the film, I honestly thought it was a romantic comedy. I have always been partial to a good spaghetti western, especially featuring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, so watching Life Is Beautiful didn't seem a big stretch.
And for the first hour or so, it did seem like a rom-com in its own quirky, Italian way.
Roberto Benigni's character, Guido, is all charm and chaos, winning over the love of his life with slapstick humour. It was funny. Warm. Light on its feet.
Then, without warning, it turns. And by the end, it's something else entirely: something devastatingly human, or maybe inhuman.
At the time, it didn't quite connect (mind you, in my 30s I was probably about as deep as puddle). I was younger and without kids, so I hadn't yet felt what it means to want to protect someone so badly that you'd bend reality for them.
Watching it now, it felt like a gut punch.
Guido, now a father, finds himself and his young son in a nazi concentration camp. To shield the boy from the horror, he creates a fantasy: that it's all a game. If the boy follows the 'rules' and earns enough points, he'll win a real tank.
Years later, the boy, who's now grown up, calls that illusion 'his gift to me'.
I may not have fully understood that message when I first saw the film, but I do now. That line strikes a chord: it makes you think about what it means to shield someone, not out of deception, but out of love.
Lately, the world feels pretty heavy, doesn't it? And there are all sorts of headlines that you may want to shield your kids or grandkids from.
And so, it's got some of us thinking about sanctuaries. Not just physical spaces, but emotional ones. A grandparent's house. A mate's shed. A treehouse. A conversation you don't have. The ability to hold back the world for just a bit longer, until they're ready.
We live in an age where information, especially of the worst kind, is just about impossible to avoid.
Kids see more than we ever did. So the instinct remains: to preserve a little innocence for as long as we can.
It's not a new idea; sometimes harsh life lessons delivered through stories have been around since Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were boys.
And the final moments have always been used to cut through everything and hit you 'in the feels'.
I remember feeling shaken when I walked out of the film Spotlight, about journalists at The Boston Globe uncovering child abuse in the city's Catholic church. The slow scroll of cities and towns where priests had been accused of abuse went on for page after page, and left me speechless.
Or that moment in Dead Poets Society, when Todd climbs on the desk and says, 'O Captain! My Captain!' It was the kind of scene you never forget.
Even that mighty TV comedy Blackadder got real in its final episode. Set in the trenches of World War I, in the final three minutes, Blackadder stopped being a comedy and became a tribute to the futility of war: one of the most subtly powerful anti-war statements ever seen.
And what about the final scene of The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy Dufresne finally reaches the Pacific? Freedom, hope and friendship all washing ashore.
And while I've got you, let's think about The Usual Suspects. That twist when Verbal Kint is revealed to be Keyser Soze left me gobsmacked. Some people reckon they saw that coming; yeah, right.
I've lost count of how many people swear they knew all along that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense. Roughly equivalent to how many blokes are adamant they were sitting right behind Dom Sheed, when he kicked the winning goal in the 2018 AFL Grand Final.
It's like that most famous of all endings, when it's revealed in Planet Of The Apes that that the space adventure was actually playing out on Earth. I'll admit that I was as confused as Charlton Heston when he saw the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand.
I've spent most of my life reporting on sport — Eagles' premierships, triumphant wins, heartbreaking losses and all the drama in between. And as I've said previously, sport matters. But other stories can remind you what's really important.
Heroic acts don't just happen in stadiums. Sometimes they happen in kitchens. In bedtime stories. In the choice to tell your child that the world is still a safe place. In pretending, just for a little while longer, that life is beautiful.