Jojo Rabbit

Dann Sind Wir Helden
or
"Gesundheit" (Definitely Not a Good Time to Be a Nazi...)

Ah, satire.

You can't win with it. There are going to be people who say it goes too far and there are going to be people who say it trivializes horror and injustice and there are going to be people who say it doesn't go far enough.

Which means that it's pissing people off and that's just right. It's doing its job. Autocrats of all stripes do not like satire. And they won't like New Zealand director Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit, either. 

That's alright. Autocrats don't deserve to have a good time.

Waititi might be new to some, his most popular movie being Thor: Ragnarok, which brought a breath of fresh jovial air to the most atrophied of the Marvel Universe series, but his earlier works, Boy, What We Do in the Shadows, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople showed an anarchic sense of comedy and film-making that was fun, heart-warming, and refreshing. He makes darn fine films, even if the silliness in them might discourage one from thinking so.

But, Waititi's free-form adaptation of the first half of New Zealand author Christine Leunens' "Caging Skies" is one of those approaches where to go all out silly might be the antidote to a story that is, on the face of it, about cruelty, inhumanity, and the depths of evil that human beings and a complacent society can sink into.

"I am Jojo Betzler. I am 10 years old...today, I will become a man." That traditional line of a Bar Mitzvah is turned on its head, as Johannes (Roman Griffin Davis) is dressing for his first day on his way to becoming a man, thanks to a camp to train Hitler Youth, run by Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell). It is a dream of the scrawny young Jojo to do well at the camp for his ultimate dream is to be made part of the honorary guard to his hero, Adolph Hitler (Taika Waititi) himself. It should be a shoe-in, as the Fuehrer is already an imaginary friend of Jojo ("Heil me, man!") appearing in times of confusion and distress to provide simple advice that a 10 year old boy might understand ("People used to say a lot of nasty things about me: 'Oh, this guy's a lunatic' 'Oh, look at that psycho, he's going to get us all killed!'").

Johannes lives with his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) who is skeptical of his devotion to Nazism while maintaining a sunny disposition, despite her husband being missing from the household. Johannes thinks he's fighting for the Nazis in Africa, but his Mom remains mum.

The Hitlerjugend Camp is run—if that is the term—by Klenzendorf, a hard-drinking, not very competent soldier who has clearly been given an assignment he can't screw up, let alone harm the floundering war effort. He barks the rhetoric with a slightly cynical weariness, wears the uniform not too nattily (while secretly designing something a little flashier if highly unregulation), knows he's been benched from anything important, but is a good little soldier who does his duty ("Even though we're losing the war, everything seems to be going fine...").

Jojo does not have an easy time with the prospective Hitlerjugend. He can salute precisely, has a force-fed hatred of the Jews (of whom he knows nothing about and who take on mythic properties), but even the worst of best intentions does not necessarily translate to actions. When he is picked out to kill a rabbit by strangulation, he can't do it, and is mocked mercilessly by the trainers and his fellow acolytes, with a new name pointing out his weakness—"Jojo Rabbit".

Jojo runs away to the woods is consoled by his pal, Adolph. So much so, that, his brio renewed, he charges back to the camp in the middle of a grenade training class...

...and manages to blow himself up.

Needless to say, grenade training is suspended for the day and Klenzendorf is reprimanded and given a dressing-down by Jojo's mother, who puts Jojo's further training in Klenzendorf's hands, but, this time, but now restricted to the Hitler Youth headquarters.

Jojo spends some time in hospital and is distressed that his face is scarred up, making him look less Aryan and therefore "monstrous," making him feel further ostracized from his Nazi countrymen.

Jojo learns, though, to be independent because his mother is spending less time at home (she is secretly working for the resistance). But, he's also home alone more than usual. He begins to hear odd noises in the house, coming from within the house. A furtive investigation finds that, hidden in a storage section of his late sister's room, is a teen-aged girl named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). Jojo takes an immediate dislike to her because 1) he's scared of her, 2) she's a girl, and 3) she's in his house and 4) she's Jewish.

Elsa takes advantage of his confused terror, keeping him quiet about her presence—he and his Mom will be arrested, too, of course, for hiding her. So, an uneasy pact must be made between Jojo, Nazi-in-training, and "a Jew"—who has a name, a personality, and a vague resemblance to his sister. In the waning days of the war, with everything "going fine," Jojo must deal with his own "otherness" and be in close proximity to the most wanted "other" in his blighted country.

Heavy stuff. And the monstrousness and tragedy that is the yin and yang of the Nazi machinery and those who are caught up in it is not given short shrift in Jojo Rabbit. Terrible things happen and the pain and ache and villainy of it is made apparent and communicated appropriately.

But, despite this, the movie, generally, is funny as Hell.

Partially, it's because Jojo is a kid and a mass of misinformation, schadenfreude, and the inability to live up to the rhetoric. Combine that with the lampooning of Nazi doctrine where there is no room for doubt despite ample evidence to the contrary surrounding you and you have, not so much a comedy of errors as a comedy of dogma.

And therein the front of satire lies. Everything you know is wrong, yet you march on in the same goose-step anyway even if it's through a mine-field of your own making. Fortunately, the movie spends a great deal of time mocking the tenets of Nazism leading to such observations as Jojo's friend telling him: "It's not a good time to be a Nazi. Our only friends are the Japanese—and just between you and me, they don't look very Aryan." It may be a little UN-PC, but it's to the point. If it had been merely this, it would not be very successful. But, as it involves a change of heart and a valuable learning experience on the part of the protagonist, it's actually valuable and sweet.

And Hitler has never been funnier.