Pinocchio (2002) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

and F. Scott Fitzgerald

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had all the advantages that you've had."

Despite his borrowed wisdom from The Great Gatsby, my father was not a man of great insight. Of course, he wouldn't have been so inappropriately generous to his fellow man if he had known about Roberto Benigni.

Most of you are familiar with the story of Pinocchio, but the Disneyfied version of the story has completely superseded all other versions in American culture. Insofar as you think of Pinocchio at all, you think of a cartoon Jiminy Cricket. Luckily for America, that comic genius Robert Benigni has now given us a live actor version which restores the original grit to the story. For example, did you know that Gepetto dreamed of creating a puppet who would come to life as a homely middle aged man?

Now you do.

You see, Benigni not only wrote and directed the film, but he also decided to star in it, thus fulfilling his lifelong dream of pushing Disney aside and giving the world Pinocchio as he was originally conceived: a bald, rubber-faced Italian man wearing a dunce cap and jammies made from one of Elvis's old jumpsuits.

Benigni's triple threat contribution earned him three well-deserved Razzie nominations for Worst Screenplay, Worst Director, and Worst Actor. He had too much competition in the Worst Picture categories (one word: Madonna), but he snuck in as a surprise winner in the acting category, defeating all the usual suspects like Adam Sandler and Steven Seagal, and fending off a strong challenge from his countryman Adriano Giannini, whose star shone so brightly in Swept Away.

Just because he won a Razzie, Benigni is not content to rest on his laurels. As he sits there brooding on the unknown world which looms before him, he knows he can be even sillier in the future. In the upcoming years, he resolves never to walk again, but only to skip happily and cluelessly, like a demented child. He resolves to step on twice as many rakes, and get pummeled by twice as many custard pies. He is considering having all the bones in his face and legs removed, so that he can walk sillier and make sillier faces. Like other true cultural pioneers, from Chuck Yeager to Larry Clark, he vows to keep testing the outside of his chosen envelope.

The ultimate silliness.

That is his dream, and it must have seemed so close in Pinocchio that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond Hollywood and Rome, where he could prance and pratfall through the wide open fields of slapstick which roll on under the infinite night, dotted with banana peels.

Like Gatsby, he believes in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. For Benigni it is the future of goofiness. It eluded him then, but that's no matter - tomorrow Benigni will walk sillier, fall harder ... and one fine morning ....

(I didn't suddenly learn how to write. Whatever eloquence those paragraphs may possess, it is the eloquence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who knew a thing or two about stringin' words together.)