JOJO RABBIT: How to Misfire at Nazis
Taika Waititi's latest film carries his usual social satire for all the wrong reasons with his dull Nazi rendition in Jojo Rabbit.
Jojo Rabbit is an interesting release, after Fox Searchlight reportedly didn't know how to market the film with its subject matter, and it surprisingly won the TIFF Audience Award (a feat that has successfully predicted Oscar winners of recent years like Green Book and Twelve Years a Slave). Based on the novel Caging Skies, Jojo Rabbit tells the story of Johannes Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), a young German boy infatuated with Nazi's and his imaginary best friend Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi). The film follows the tribulations Jojo faces after discovering his mother (Scarlett Johansson) is harboring a Jewish girl named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) in their house.
Jojo Rabbit is much of the same from director Taika Waititi (What We Do In The Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor: Ragnarok), as he infuses whimsical humor through light and dark moments alike. While it has worked effectively in previous projects, it sends the wrong message with Jojo. Throughout the entire film, all we see are wisecracking, dubious Nazi's who commit evil acts off-screen in a jovial manner ("Heil Hitler!"). Waititi handles everything with such a light air that even tragic moments in the film seem light and meaningless. Characters lack such depth that they are portraying hollow caricatures of Nazi's and Germans of the quality of an SNL sketch. Sam Rockwell—wasted. Alfie Allen—wasted. Rebel Wilson—wasted. Scarlett Johansson—wasted. All of these actors give one-note, over-the-top performances that instill a fantastical element to a film that centers on Nazi's searching for and killing Jews and Germans in the historical Holocaust era.
Everything in the film is sweet and endearing, from the vibrant cinematography to the upbeat musical choices. Composer Michael Giacchino (Up, Ratatouille) is greatly wasted here, delivering boiler-plate scores that add nothing on an emotional level. The film is sure to cause debate over the timing and substance of Nazi's in our current political climate, which should be considered. It seems Waititi was going for Benigni's Life is Beautiful approach to the dense subject-matter, but he greatly misfired in a realistic sense. The tone for this film is all over the place, particularly between the first and second halves, which pivot hard from comedy to light drama ineffectively. Characters we spend several minutes with get narrative choices meant to evoke a response from the audience, which feels cheap, dirty, and unwarranted. Nice moments between Jojo and Elsa are quickly disrupted by zany Nazi's and Waititi's wholly-unfunny Adolf Hitler. One would think a film exploring an imaginary Hitler, Nazi Germany, and a young boy tied between all of it would have gripping narrative evolution, but none of that lies here, as Jojo Rabbit offers the audience an ultra-sincere and simple view of the Holocaust period. As IndieWire's Eric Kohn said, "The cartoon Nazis in “Jojo Rabbit” are so far removed from reality that they make it all too easy to laugh off the circumstances at hand. That’s not only crass but disingenuous, a feature-length variation of the shower-scene fake-out in “Schindler’s List.”
With critics questioning the validity of a film like Joker, which tells a narrative from a murky, violent protagonist, it should be discussed how the opposite end of the spectrum in Jojo lies with an upbeat look at a historical atrocity. Whereas Joker arguably questions the audience's tendency to dismiss mentally-ill people and be a catalyst for toxic behavior, Jojo Rabbit seems to say Nazi's were a silly, dumb group of people that we should only laugh at now. Unlike Tarantino's revisionist Inglorious Basterds, Nazi's here are our friends and little kids shoot grenade launchers because it's fun! In reality, Neo-Nazi's and white supremacists exist. Hate exists, but Jojo Rabbit inhabits an ethereal dimension filled with alternate history that reeks of flippancy to the millions who suffered.
Sean Kelso is the founder and editor-in-chief of Greyscale.
