Sadly, the initial promise in Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio is never fully realized.
And that's no lie.
This live-action version of Carlo Collodi's 1883 morality tale opens with The Blue Fairy's nightly journey.
She travels in a magnificent glass Cinderella-style coach pulled by hundreds of tiny white mice. Her coachman, who doubles as her butler, is a humanoid poodle with long ears who carries a large stuffed cat.
The Blue Fairy watches over a small Italian village and its outlying countryside smiling benevolently on the good and sternly on the wicked.
She soon has her hands and eyes full with Pinocchio, the puppet boy crafted by the kindly but poor craftsman Geppetto.
From the moment he's given life, Pinocchio sees it as one huge adventure that should not include school, responsibility, rules or discipline -- which means, if he doesn't mend his foolish ways, he'll make a donkey of himself.
Benigni, who won a best-actor Oscar for his poignant performance in 1997's Life is Beautiful, co-wrote, directs and stars as Pinocchio in a performance that literally has him bouncing off walls.
The audience never sees Geppetto's creation as a wooden puppet. It's instantly a flesh-and-blood, stringless, chattering Benigni.
And there's no indication why the Blue Fairy (Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni's wife and the film's producer) worked this incredible magic.
Even with its $50-million US budget, Pinocchio never quite achieves the feel of a fanciful motion picture. It unreels more like an episode of TV's Storybook Theatre.
There are some winning moments, particularly when Pinocchio encounters the devious Cat and Fox, whose makeup is superbly subtle. And when Pinocchio meets the naughty boy Leonardo in jail and then follows him to the Fun Fair, the film achieves the honesty it desperately needs.
The film suffers from its use of dubbed voices, but it's understandable given that the target audience in North America is young children who'd have difficulty with subtitles.
Benigni's broad, slapstick style of acting can be grating, even embarassing, as he proved with 1993's disastrous Son of the Pink Panther.
What works for him in his Italian films Johnny Stecchino, The Monster and Life Is Beautiful seems forced and grating in Pinocchio.
Benigni's Pinocchio is superior to the 1996 Jonathan Taylor Thomas version, but it's still light years away from the true magic of Disney's 1943 animated classic.
Benigni was pulling too many strings and, like the puppet boy, he and his film need far more discipline and restraint.
(This film is rated F)
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