FILM
26 • OCTOBER 25, 2019 • LOSANGELESBLADE.COM
Nazi comedy “Jojo Rabbit” serves savage satire with a tender heart By JOHN PAUL KING
Roman Griffin Davis and Taika Waititi in “Jojo Rabbit” Image courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures
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Not that long ago, stories about the Second World War were a staple in literature, movies, and television. This is hardly surprising; it was a monumental event in world history, so of course it was going to take a long time to process. Narratives about it, both fictional and true, saturated the popular culture for decades. Since the century turned, the global upheavals of a new millennium have inevitably overshadowed those of the generation that came before, and narratives about the war have become fewer and further between. That doesn’t mean they’ve disappeared; something about that particular conflict continues to call out to us from the past, and Taika Waititi’s latest effort, “Jojo Rabbit” – a black comedy hitting theaters on Oct. 18 – just might get to the heart of not only why we still feel the need to cast our gaze back upon it, but of why, more than 70 years later, it’s still important for us to do so. In its advertising, his film has taken pains to ensure that audiences know going in they will be seeing an “anti-hate satire.” It’s a savvy decision, given current sensitivity around the subject matter, but the description doesn’t quite live up to the sophisticated comedic exercise the New Zealand filmmaker delivers. Set in a German town near the end of WWII, it focuses on 10-year-old Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), a lonely misfit of a little boy who zealously embraces the Nazi ideal; his father is away at the front, and his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) is frequently absent, leaving him to spend most of his time in the sole company of his imaginary friend – none other than an idealized version of his idol, Hitler himself (Waititi). His youthful contentment is shaken one day when he goes upstairs to investigate a noise in his empty house and discovers that his beloved mother is hiding a young Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie). Confronted with this revelation, he is forced to reexamine his beliefs even as the lie of Hitler’s Germany begins to crumble in the world outside. Based on the book “Caging Skies,” by Christine Leunens, Waititi’s screenplay for “Jojo Rabbit” charges forward with his now-familiar irreverent humor and gives us no time to be shocked that he’s giving us a comedy about Nazi Germany. It’s likely to be a little distasteful for some audiences, but it’s not exactly a first; many filmmakers have made fun of Hitler, from Charlie Chaplin to Mel Brooks. Waititi, though, goes into riskier territory, mining for laughs within the atrocities of daily life under a mad, authoritarian regime. Few filmmakers have dared such an effort – for instance, Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful,” which polarized critics in 1997 with its heart-tugging, tragicomic vision of existence in a concentration camp, and to which “Jojo Rabbit” has already been compared – and it has rarely gone well. Waititi, though, seems little concerned with perceived taboos about what constitutes fair game for humor. He’s playing the iconoclast here just as boldly as when he successfully transformed Marvel’s “Thor” franchise from pompous pseudo-myth to raucous buddy comedy in 2017’s “Ragnorok,” and he aims to win you over through sheer audacity. He willfully pushes the tone of his movie into the realm of the absurd, even the surreal – at times, it almost feels like a Terry Gilliam film – because he knows it is there where humor and horror meet. Nothing drives home the inherent absurdity of the most appalling human endeavors like finding yourself laughing in its face. There’s a kind of epiphany that can take place in that moment, a perspective from which one recognizes the deeply truthful human element in the mix; Waititi is gambling that he can take you to that threshhold, and – for the most part – he succeeds. Part of the reason has to do with his talent; his disarming quirkiness and inventive visual storytelling, coupled with top-notch performances from a cast that seems fully committed to his vision, goes a long way toward making it work. What elevates his film to the level of true cinema, though, is that he shows us this absurdity through the eyes of a child who accepts without question the racism and rhetoric of a demagogue. His understanding of what it all means – underscored by the buffoonish, childlike vision of Hitler he imagines – is unsophisticated and uneducated, because he’s only a boy, after all, but when we see it reflected in the adult characters around him, blindly following orders and clinging to the illusions in which they have so deeply invested themselves, it’s more difficult to reconcile the obvious gap between their humanity and their choices. What manner of mental hoops must these adults have had to jump through in order to maintain their childish trust in authority, and what encounters with other ways of thinking have they had to dismiss, devalue or ignore? Continues at losangelesblade.com