Saw Miracle in Milan, an utterly delightful fantasy. It opens with an old woman finding a baby boy in her cauliflower patch. She raises him as her own and one day comes back to find him gazing sullenly at a pot which has boiled over, its contents spilling in a stream across the floor. Rather than getting angry, she pulls out toy trees and houses and places them around the overflow like it's a river. "What a great grand place the world is!" She cries. This sets the tone for the film. Everything always gets better. It's wish-fulfillment pure and simple, but it has enough whimsy and magic to carry the film, I felt.
I have a great fondness for whimsy, so take that for what it's worth. I thought that this was unpredictable enough to always surprise and delight. As the film progresses, the boy grows up, his old mother dies, and he goes off to find work. With no work to be found, he winds up in a hobo-ville shanty-town which is so miserable and cold that people spend most of their time rushing about from sunbeam to sunbeam. There is a bit of hand-tipping at this point, when a hobo with a slightly nicer coat tries to hoard a sunbeam all to himself. Clearly the have-nots are the heroes, oppressed by the evil haves. I wouldn't go so far as to claim any (particularly strong) political leanings for this film however. Rooting for the underdog has always been crowd-pleasing.
Anyway, the boy organizes the shanty-town into a shanty-metropolis so nice, even the rich are moving in. The film continues to get more and more hysterically happy from there. At times it's a little cloying, and there's some 1950s race-relations stuff that is pretty cringey, but on the whole, I thought it was great.
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