96 Time November 4, 2019
MOVIES
A dark, stylized comedy
leads us into the light
By Stephanie Zacharek
even Though filmmakers as revered as charlie
Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch have made movies that lampoon
the Nazis and their one-note obsessions, Holocaust humor is
still a delicate proposition. Laughter may be one of human-
kind’s best survival mechanisms, but jokes about Hitler and
those who did his bidding aren’t an easy sell—their crimes are
too inhumane to allow for laughs.
That’s the turf Taika Waititi steps onto with his incandes-
cently strange and openhearted black comedy Jojo Rabbit.
Roman Griffin Davis plays Jojo, a tyke growing up in 1940s
Germany who, with his rapturous smile and blond hair combed
up into merengue-like tufts, would be adorable except for one
thing: at 10, he’s already a Hitler zealot. He loves his country’s
leader so much, he appears to have conjured a sort of Hitler
hologram: Der Führer (played by Waititi, in a performance
poised on the knife-edge of comical exaggeration and unnerv-
ing verisimilitude) appears to him privately, in moments of tri-
umph and crisis, giving him tips on improving his “Heil!” and
bolstering him after he fails, at the bidding of a couple of older
Nazi youth, to kill a sweet, quivering rabbit.
Jojo isn’t so tough after all, and his mother Rosie (Scarlett
Johansson, who’s the lustrous soul of the movie) knows it. His
Nazi fixation cuts against everything she believes, though she
doesn’t dare express that. When the two encounter a group of
traitors who’ve been hanged in the town square—we don’t see
their faces, but their legs dangle, a lifeless reproach, a few feet
off the ground—Jojo asks what these people did to deserve
such a fate. Her clipped answer: “What they could.”
△
Davis, Waititi and
Johansson in Jojo
Rabbit: good battles
evil at the family
dinner tableIt turns out that Rosie is harboring
a secret from her son: a teenage girl,
Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), is living in
a hidden space in the family’s house.
Jojo stumbles into Elsa’s warren-like
quarters by accident, and his initial hor-
ror over his discovery—as a Jew, she’s
everything he has been conditioned
to hate— eventually gives way to more
complicated, and more tender, feelings.NoNe of that, admittedly, makes Jojo
Rabbit sound very funny. It’s Waititi’s
ability to balance unassailably goofy
moments with an acknowledgment of
real-life horrors that makes the movie
exceptional. (He adapted the screenplay
from a novel, Caging Skies, by Christine
Leunens.) Waititi establishes the tone—
a vibe that will eventually take a hair-
pin twist—in the opening credits, set-
ting the German version of the Beatles’
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” against
vintage footage of Führer-mad Germans
cheering and saluting their idol.
The sequence is cheekily obvious.
It’s also exhilarating, a suitable open-
ing into the world of extremes Waititi is
about to show us, in vivid, highly styl-
ized colors: even Hitler’s eyes are an
exaggerated, trustworthy blue. Many of
the jokes, too, are delightfully obvious:
a group of Gestapo officers is so large
that once they’ve Heil Hitler!–ed every-
one in their immediate vicinity, the
words swirl into nonsense soup, like a
round-robin homage to Mel Brooks.
Jojo Rabbit isn’t subtle, yet it’s still
somehow delicate—more of a piece
with Waititi’s earlier films, like the
prickly-sweet 2016 coming-of-age
comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople,
than with his booming 2017 Marvel
hit, Thor: Ragnarok. Jojo Rabbit’s ad
campaign calls the movie “an anti-
hate satire,” which perhaps doesn’t do
it any favors. Being anti -hate is almost
as vague as being pro-rainbow: Who
doesn’t like rainbows?
But then, nearly every other news
story these days addresses some prob-
lem that has sprung from hatred of “the
other,” whoever that other might be.
Evil can recycle itself, wearing a differ-
ent disguise each time it appears. Jojo
Rabbit is an entreaty to stay vigilant,
and to live up to the ultimate epitaph:
They did whaT They could. □TimeOff Reviews