The Italian filmmaker Roberto Benigni took quite a gamble when he decided to set his Oscar-winning 1998 comedy “Life Is Beautiful” amid the horrors of the Holocaust. Playing a jovial Jewish waiter named Guido, Mr. Benigni cast himself more as a luckless victim of circumstance — that is, one of many Jews trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time — than as one of Italy’s Fascists or even the broader villain of ethnic hatred. The movie worked because Guido transformed his natural goofiness and bright sense of humor into courage, laughing his way through a looming genocidal nightmare for the benefit of his loved ones, knowing all the while that hope was futile.

Many of the moviegoers who weren’t immediately put off by the very premise of “Life Is Beautiful” found themselves beguiled by Mr. Benigni’s own courage in suggesting that a laugh is often the only salve for a burdened soul.

One could see how the same idea could be applied to a film about the current war in Iraq, where Mr. Benigni has set “The Tiger and the Snow.” After all, victims, whether of Saddam Hussein’s long and merciless reign or of America’s defective attempt to liberate his soon-to-be former country, abound. But here the filmmaker has cast himself as an outsider, leaving the fragile sense of courage under fire that propelled “Life Is Beautiful” to crumble around him like so many of the buildings that populate the Baghdad of his vision.

Mr. Benigni plays Attilio de Giovanni, a divorced poetry professor madly in love with a writer named Vittoria (Nicoletta Braschi, who literally performs most of her role with her eyes closed), about whom he has the same dream every night. Attilio, like so many of Mr. Benigni’s past characters, skips and jokes through life with the joyful twitchiness of a child, shamelessly wooing the luscious Vittoria at every opportunity. When Vittoria travels to Iraq on the eve of the American invasion to interview the subject of her next book, an exiled Iraqi poet named Fuad (a typically stoic and brooding Jean Reno), she is severely injured in an explosion and is expected to die. Attilio, unable to envision a world without his love, poses as a surgeon and scams a ride to Baghdad that very night with the Red Cross in an effort to nurse Vittoria back to health. When he is informed that the hospital is without the necessary drugs and supplies to help her, Attilio sets about doing everything he can to save her, cooking up medicines on the advice of an wise old apothecary, buying an oxygen tank off some looters, even bringing a fly swatter back to Vittoria’s dingy hospital room to fight off the pests that fill the air (“We have found our weapon of mass destruction!” he tells her).

As he stumbles through the barren and pockmarked landscapes of Iraq, Attilio is like a neutral state all his own, finding as many confusions and misconceptions with the polite locals as with the jittery American soldiers he encounters; whenever he finds a bit of trouble, he repeatedly (and hilariously) shouts,”I am Italian!”His battle to save a single life amid the madness provides the story a central nobility, and it is no doubt meant to extend to the larger idea that Vittoria’s waning life force parallels that of the Iraqi people as a whole — indeed, of everyone trapped in this awful war.

But it is that same single-minded devotion to his love that undermines the heart of “The Tiger and the Snow.” Attilio’s near obliviousness to the chaos around him, to the suffering in the streets, seems to morph into virtual indifference. Were a better script guiding the character, it could be to the film’s credit that the politics and motives of the Iraq war are left to the outermost margins, leaving only a human story at its center. Instead, one gets the feeling that, though Attilio probably believes his desperate struggle is the tragic result of an untenable war, if he could somehow save Vittoria at the expense of any number of Iraqi lives and get back home to Italy with her in his arms, he’d do it in a heartbeat.

Meanwhile, Fuad’s life-and-death struggle with his conscience and identity as an Iraqi in his own time of ferocious upheaval is offered only the scraps from Mr. Benigni’s script. When Fuad’s involvement in the story comes to its end, it can be taken either as a melodramatic political inference or simply a painful bump in the road for Attilio, who has his own story to resolve.

Is that romance or callousness? As the final frames arrive, we are meant to believe the former. But as the birds sing and the sun pours down on an idyllic courtyard in Rome, the bombs are exploding and killing scores more in Iraq, far, far away.