Audrey Fox
Ever since Disney brought the little wooden boy to life in 1940, filmmakers haven’t been able to stop futzing with the magical morality tale of Pinocchio. It’s 82 years later, and we’ve got not one, not two, but three adaptations of the story warring for dominance. One is a fairly soulless example of Disney’s live action reboot addiction, one a dark, creatively ambitious stop-motion adventure from Guillermo del Toro, and the third a direct-to-video Pauly Shore vehicle, a phrase that has no business being written in the 21st century. But they all stand on the shoulders of giants: Not just Disney’s, but the poor, maligned Roberto Benigni’s.
In 1999, Benigni won the Academy Award for Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film for the Holocaust dramedy Life Is Beautiful. Audiences fell in love (to the tune of $230 million at the global box office), but there was something about the earnestness of its plucky breakout star that made more cynical viewers smell blood in the water. They were ready to pounce on Roberto Benigni at his first misstep, and they got their opportunity when he directed and starred in a 2002 adaptation of Pinocchio that was widely ridiculed as an unmitigated disaster. But was Pinocchio really that bad, or has it been unfairly castigated and, in some aspects, set up to fail?
Let’s be fair: Pinocchio had some legitimate issues that made it a difficult sell from the very beginning. The choice to have Roberto Benigni not just direct the film, which was clearly a passion project for him, but actually take on the title role of Pinocchio is a strange one. There’s something fundamentally unsettling about a grown man, then nearly 50 years old, playing a child puppet. The fact that Benigni couldn’t distance himself from the film enough to realize that audiences were always going to react negatively to that artistic decision certainly didn’t bode well for the prospects of Pinocchio.
There is also room for criticism of the filmmaking itself: Benigni’s sense of magical realism, employed to such great effect in Life Is Beautiful, misses the mark in Pinocchio. It falls flat at several points , and he fails to inject it with much charm or humor that could allow audiences to look past the miscasting of the lead character.
These issues aside, the original Italian version of Pinocchio is goofy and flawed, but not terrible –certainly not bad enough to warrant the amount of derision it continues to receive. In fact, in its native Italy, Pinocchio was fairly well-regarded, winning acclaim especially for its costumes and production design, taking home two prestigious David di Donatello awards. The real trainwreck came when Miramax got its hands on the film, prepping it for release in the United States and committing a cinematic atrocity in the process.
First, they bungled the dubbing of the film into English. One could argue that their first mistake was underestimating the willingness of American audiences to watch a film with subtitles – after all, Benigni himself had shepherded Life Is Beautiful to a massive US box office showing, and became the first non-English-speaking performance to win Best Actor in Oscar history. If nothing else, this proves that the challenges of the subtitle were not insurmountable for the right film. But Miramax made the decision to not only dub over the Italian dialogue, but to do so poorly, casting Breckin Meyer in the role of Pinocchio for reasons that are inexplicable to this day. Meyer might be right for any number of roles, but an Italian boy-puppet is not one of them. And while he might not be the strangest choice of voice actors for Pinocchio, now that Pauly Shore has taken a crack at it, his extremely Californian accent was not exactly a natural fit.
Aside from the questionable casting choices, the craftsmanship on display with the dub did the film no favors. Miramax clearly determined that this was not going to be a profitable film for them and, in putting together a cheap, sloppy dub, created a self-fulfilling prophecy. When critics almost universally panned the film, many made specific mention of the dub being at the root of the film’s problems; Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times noted their poor synchronization writing, “the dubbed mouths of the Italian cast are probably still moving an hour after the film is over.” To make matters worse, Miramax had an unusually heavy hand in the editing process, recutting the film to accommodate the new English dub, but also restructuring scenes and adding in a narrator, resulting in a final product that strayed wildly from Benigni’s original intentions.
Many critics were quick to point the finger at Miramax for their disastrous release (Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader explicitly called them out, noting, “a good 75% of the awfulness is attributable to Miramax”). Still, as the years went by, some of this clarity was lost, and the reasons why Pinocchio was regarded as such a laughable failure became muddled. With Miramax’s role in the debacle a long-forgotten memory, there was only one person left to blame, the man who chose himself to be the face of the disaster. Roberto Benigni’s only cinematic crime was having the ego that convinced him he was right for the leading role, and the lack of vision to turn in a truly magical Pinocchio adaptation. He’s hardly the first to fall victim to either of those fatal flaws, yet few have been judged as harshly or taken a larger blow to their careers. There’s a lesson to be learned here: If you’re going to try to adapt a beloved family fairy tale that has a high likelihood of failure, don’t also put your grinning face with a long wooden nose on the label, reminding everyone who’s to blame. 
“Pinocchio” is available for digital rental or purchase.
