Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

ROME — The current film hit by one of Italy's favorite comic actors is a moving — and, at times, hilarious — fable about love, suffering and survival that is largely set in a Nazi death camp.

Since opening in mid-December, "La Vita e' Bella" (Life is Beautiful) has packed cinemas across Italy and taken in more than $20 million.

At the same time, it has sparked widespread debate among Jews and non-Jews alike about the manner in which the Holocaust can — or should — be portrayed on film.

But Jewish actor Moni Ovadia liked it so much that he bestowed the title "honorary Jew" on non-Jewish comedian Roberto Benigni, who directed, co-wrote and starred in the movie.

In the film, Benigni, with his trademark wild hair, receding chin and manic style, plays Guido, an Italian Jew in the Tuscan town of Arezzo in the late 1930s. Guido falls in love with, courts and marries Dora, a non-Jewish woman. They have a son whom they name Giosue.

Suddenly, without warning, on the boy's fifth birthday, Guido and Giosue are deported by German occupiers to a Nazi death camp. Dora demands — and is allowed — to be deported with them.

Dora and Giosue come through the ordeal alive. Guido becomes one of the 6 million.

Benigni's account of how Guido ensures his son's survival is the crux of the film — and of the controversy surrounding it.

From the beginning, Guido decides to protect Giosue by convincing him that the deportation, the death camp and all the horrors around them are obstacles in a strange, exciting game.

Benigni's antics in maintaining this make-believe are sometimes hilarious. But a clearly conveyed sense of desperation permeates the gags. It is clear that Guido is walking a tightrope — one false step and all will be lost.

It is a powerful demonstration of a father's love for his child — and a child's trust in his father.

The first half of the movie is a screwball comedy that sets up Guido's character as a romantic jokester and also presents him as a perfectly integrated Italian everyman, no different from anyone else. In one hilarious scene he impersonates a fascist bureaucrat and uses himself as an example of the Aryan ideal.

There is no indication that Guido is Jewish until halfway into the film, when an anti-Semitic slogan suddenly — and shockingly — appears.

"I wanted to portray a Jew who was not recognized by precise signs, but who was the same as I am," Benigni told the Rome Jewish monthly Shalom. "I wanted the audience to ask themselves, `Why are they deporting Benigni, how could they take even him?' [Guido] is a Jew who lives his life, who is not involved in politics, who does his job and then suddenly down comes this ax that smashes his life, just as it really happened."

Italy's leading research center on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism was an adviser on the film, as were several Holocaust survivors.

Daniel Vogelmann, the son of an Auschwitz survivor, criticized the film for not realistically enough portraying the death camp and its conditions — or the prewar fascist climate.

Shlomo Venezia, who spent 10 months in Auschwitz and consulted on the movie, said this critique missed the point of the film.

"The film as a whole works, particularly for the Italian mind," Venezia said after the screening for Rome's Jewish community. "You could never show on film just what Auschwitz was really like. For someone who didn't live through it, I think that the Benigni film can have a greater effect than `Schindler's List.' For me, `Schindler's List' seemed impossible."

Several people in the Jewish community suggested that the film could be used in schools as a teaching tool.