Mark Reviews Movies: JOJO RABBIT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 24, 2019

With enough time and distance, people and events can and usually do begin to lose their power. After all, people begin to forget—not only as individuals, but also as a society, since the people who were alive as witnesses die and those who weren't born yet become the majority. That's the bet that writer/director Taika Waititi makes with Jojo Rabbit, which sees Nazism as a joke and Adolf Hitler as a very silly man indeed. The basic premise is that the Nazis were bad, so it's more than fine to laugh at them. It's a moral imperative.

Laughing at the Nazis seems to be Waititi's only moral imperative with this movie, which becomes a pretty significant problem for it. Waititi (working from Christine Leunens' novel Caging Skies) assumes two contradictory things here: 1.) We know what horrors the Nazis committed and don't need to be reminded of them, and 2.) we should forget those horrors while watching the movie, in order to see this system and the figures within it as little more than a joke.

The Nazis, as well as those going along with their ideology, here are mostly harmless. We twice see the bodies of people who have been hanged for "crimes" against the state, but there's no context to their righteous actions (When asked what these people did, a decent character says, "What they could"—which is a nice but still evasive sentiment) or their unjust deaths. The assorted soldiers we meet are either fanatics and, hence, worthy of being mocked or, in one major case, only pretending to be a fanatic and, hence, worthy of some sympathy by the end. A group of Gestapo agents could mean the end of our protagonist, his mother, and the Jewish girl hiding in their house, but those members of the secret police—so busy saluting everybody and so distracted by their hatred—miss what's right in front of them.

As for Hitler, he's only seen here as a figment of 10-year-old Jojo's (Roman Griffin Davis) imagination, so the movie isn't even mocking the murderous dictator. It's only joking about a young boy's view of him—and even that doesn't make much sense, since Waititi, who plays the imaginary Hitler, portrays him as a fop.

Jojo truly believes in Nazism, primarily—or at least it seems—to fit in with the rest of German society and his peers. After a brief prologue (setting up Jojo's forthcoming attendance at a Hitler Youth camp and the gimmick of Hitler as a his imaginary friend), the opening credits proceed with archival footage of crowds cheering for Hitler, while a blatantly anachronistic Beatles song (sung in German) plays in the background. The juxtaposition is startling, and it clearly establishes the power and furor of fanaticism. It's also about the end of any pointed or clever insight into the idea on the movie's part.

While at training camp near the end of the war, Jojo meets some eccentric soldiers, such as Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), who lost an eye in combat and resents being stuck with children, and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson), who brags about having 18 children for the nation since the Nazis came to power. The kid also injures himself with a grenade, while trying to prove his toughness.

Stuck at home while his saintly mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson, equal parts loving and goofy) does some secretive work, Jojo discovers a teenage girl named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding in a wall upstairs. She's Jewish and in the care of Rosie. Jojo agrees not to tell his mother that he knows about Elsa, as long as the girl tells him about the "secret powers" of Jewish people.

Obviously, Jojo gradually learns that Elsa isn't a monster or even as different as him, as propaganda has been telling him for years. The two become friends without realizing it, and the boy starts to question his fanatic beliefs.

The scenes of that relationship building are the movie's most accomplished, since they're straightforward in terms of tone, story, and character (The young actors are also quite good in their respective roles). The other scenes, which mostly set out to lampoon fictional figures within the Nazi system, are also straightforward, although they have to evade the actual context of Nazi crimes in order to accomplish this kind of silly humor.

At their best, the jokes are toothless and randomly funny (A bit involving miscommunication about a certain breed of dog is hilarious). At its worst, the movie neuters its Nazis so much that Waititi apparently feels comfortable eliciting sympathy for some of them during a slow-motion battle sequence and the ensuing consequences of defeat. There is something decidedly discomforting about a movie set in Nazi Germany in which the only war crimes are perpetrated by Allied soldiers.

Jojo Rabbit clearly stands by the theory that the easiest way to diminish the power of a person, a group of people, or an ideology is to poke fun at him/her/them/it. That might be true, but this movie proves that such a tactic isn't as easy as making evil look silly, pointing at the invented silliness, and ignoring the real evil.

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