When Taika Waititi announced that his follow-up to Thor: Ragnarok was going to be a lighthearted comedy about a boy whose imaginary friend is Hitler, and that he would be playing the Fuhrer himself, it understandably got more than a few people tugging their collars. On the surface, it does seem like bad taste to stick a clown nose on something as dire and horrific as World War II and the Holocaust, especially since fascism has made a bit of a comeback in recent years, but it’s not like it can’t be done. Mel Brooks did it, Roberto Benigni did it, hell, Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney were doing it when Hitler was still alive. It’s a fine line to walk for sure, but if anyone can do it, it’s the guy who made a neon-colored joke-a-minute gagfest about the toxicity of colonialism for Marvel.
Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is, for all intents and purposes, a good boy. He’s eager to please, listens to his mother (Scarlett Johannsson), and loves his country. The only catch is that country is Nazi Germany, and his devotion is so strong that he’s even adopted Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi) as his imaginary friend. After he’s sent home from Hitler Youth boot camp after a mishap with a stick grenade, he discovers that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) in their attic. Jojo knows that if he tells the Gestapo, then his mother will be taken away too, leading to an uneasy stalemate that challenges his most deeply held convictions.
Your ability to get behind something like Jojo Rabbit will probably hinge on how off-limits you think its subject matter is. Something as dark as a kid being indoctrinated by the Nazis may seem like the last thing you’d want to coat in Wes Anderson-lite twee, but Waititi makes it work by constantly making sure the Nazis are the butt of the joke, not distracting us from what these people truly are, but most importantly, framing it from Jojo’s naïve point of view. The first scene is Jojo preparing for Hitler Youth training like he’s getting ready for his first day of summer camp, immediately cut to footage of Triumph of the Will set to a German version of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand”. A montage of these kids going through combat training, drills and book burnings set to Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” is framed like a deleted scene from Moonrise Kingdom. Waititi’s version of Hitler is the figment of a 10-year-old’s imagination, and thus operates on the same level of maturity. To us, these are the images of a kid being brainwashed to do evil. To him, this is normal, and even fun.
That sense of normalcy is of course challenged when he discovers Elsa, whose presence is a constant source of tension for him. She had a life before being forced underground, one that Jojo was a part of since she was friends with his dead sister. But six years of hiding never eroded her cunning. She trolls Jojo at every turn by entertaining some of his most absurd notions of her (“Where does the Queen Jew lay her eggs?” he asks at one point), testing them by mentally and physically outsmarting him at every turn, and doing one of the most badass things one in her disposition could do when the Gestapo eventually come knocking on their door. Waititi has a natural talent for getting great performances out of child actors, and Roman Griffin Davis and Thomasin McKenzie both knock it out of the park, especially when the script asks them to carry more weight than most actors of any age can carry.
In fact, the performances are excellent all around. Probably the best of them is Scarlett Johansson as Jojo’s mother Rosie, a constant ray of sunshine in his life who acts as the movie’s moral center and provides some of the movie’s sweetest moments. It’s hard to believe that with a mother like her that Jojo would turn out the way he did, but that speaks more to the Third Reich’s grip on the nation’s psyche than to Rosie’s parenting abilities. Other standouts include Sam Rockwell as a disillusioned sergeant who knows the war is a lost cause and is just going through the motions, Aflie Allen as his parrot of a crony, Rebel Wilson as an obscenely bigoted true believer, and Stephen Merchant who makes a brief but memorable appearance as a menacing Gestapo officer. And while the joke of the director playing Hitler mostly boils down to a funny lampshade hanging, Taika Waititi mostly acts as the Hobbes to Jojo’s Calvin, feeding into his most childish impulses and subtly changing his tone as Jojo’s understanding of what the Nazis really are changes.
Now, you’re probably thinking that this movie lighthearted nature is disrespectful or treats the subject of Nazism and the Holocaust without the right amount of gravitas, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Although it is an absurdist satire at heart (we even see Hitler eating a unicorn’s head for dinner at one point), it never loses sight of what they’re satirizing and knows when to be serious. The third act takes an abrupt tone shift when a certain character is taken out of the picture, Berlin is sieged by the Allied forces, and the consequences of everything Jojo held dear are brought to light. The best comparison I could think of is 2010’s Four Lions, another goofy satire that pokes fun at real-world dangers (in this case, terrorism) by treating its subjects like bumbling idiots, but suddenly turns grim when the realization of what it’s been building up to comes full circle. Of course, the final outcome is very different, but explaining how would be giving away the game.
Bottom line, Jojo Rabbit is both a daring and relentlessly charming film that works just as well as a coming of age story as it does a roasting of the ridiculousness of fascism. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who thinks tackling this subject with this kind of comedic tone would be too gauche, but I think it’s a necessary reminder that even (especially) if it’s hard, there is always hope for reformation.
8/10
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