Jojo Rabbit review

Jojo Rabbit is hitting UK cinemas this week having already caused quite a kerfuffle among critics who saw it last year at festivals and in the US. The Nazi filled, feel-good comedy is a self-described “anti-hate satire” that’s somewhat controversial reception will be a new feeling for its writer/director Taika Waititi. The New Zealander’s previous work is mostly made up of crowd pleasing, generally agreeable films like Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor Ragnarok, and What we do in the Shadows. This time out he has taken the risky approach of melding his cutesy, naïve sensibilities onto a story with the darkest subject matter possible, the Holocaust.

Set in Berlin during the dying days of the Second World War, our hero is ten year old Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), a tiny and anxious boy who’s lack of killer instinct earns him an embarrassing nickname at his local Hitler youth camp. He is seemingly everything a Nazi is not, sweet and kind, with a loving mother played by Scarlett Johansson, who despises the war and her country’s part in it. Despite this, Jojo is a fanatical fan of the Reich and is egged on by his imaginary best friend, Hitler, played with goofy energy by Waititi himself.

The fanatical part is the key, and the movie is overt in its equating of Jojo’s Nazi fandom to that of a boyband devotee. He has posters of propaganda stuck all over his walls and daydreams of fighting on the front lines with his best friend Adolf. To me this is the idea the film best explores, that a lot of would-be-fascists are really just lonely little boys who buy into a ridiculous power fantasy. The tragedy is the people who get othered and hurt in these boys’ quest for validation, their myopic self-pity blinding them to the plight of others.   

              

Enter Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), a Jewish girl who Jojo’s mom has been hiding in the attic. Slightly contrived circumstances force Elsa and Jojo to spend a lot of time together alone and in doing so the boy begins to re-evaluate his beliefs about her persecuted people, some of them comically monstrous. The combination of those last two words will no doubt be a hard sell for some, but given Waititi’s background (non-white, part Jewish and very clever) I never felt as though I was being encouraged to laugh at the wrong thing. In fact the audience I was with laughed and cried pretty much exactly when I felt the director wanted them to. He’s not exactly subtle with the emotional manipulation but this is supposed to be a comedy for the whole family after all.

At least I think it is; I hope it is. This seems to me to be a great movie to show to children the same age as the young hero, as it works perfectly well as a traditional coming of age story, albeit with the added weight proto fascism. For adults, I think the film is a bit too soft in places. I appreciate what Waititi is doing as Hitler, but he could have used a bit more bite in the third act. The impact of certain key scenes is lost due to pulled punches. Also, since this is the paragraph to air grievances, the Nazi captain played by Sam Rockwell doesn’t work at all. The film would only benefit if he were to be removed altogether.

Jojo Rabbit is not, however, the complete dud some have labelled it as. Playing with Nazi imagery in any way that is not totally solemn and mournful will always provoke strong reactions, but this is a film with a legitimate and urgent point to make about the way young men are often lost to evil causes, and the ways they can be pulled back from the brink.