058 REVIEW
Directed by
TAIKA WAITITI
Starring
ROMAN GRIFFIN DAVIS
THOMASIN MCKENZIE
TAIKA WAITITI
Released
3 JANUARY
ANTICIPATION.
Taika Waititi’s idiosyncratic
voice holds possibility for tackling
youthful fascist delusion in the
alt-right era.
ENJOYMENT.
A staggeringly ill-conceived satire
that completely fails to explore its
own premise.
IN RETROSPECT.
The banality of Waititi’s passion
project is the only quality of it
that lingers.
udicrously billed as an “anti-hate satire”,
Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit is so concerned
with making its thematic intentions
unmistakable that it neglects to be a satire of any
kind. Its premise, of a young child indocrintated
from birth with Nazi ideology, is fertile ground for
commentary on how extremism can seem normal,
but Jojo’s (Roman Griffin Davis) Panglossian view
of the Third Reich lacks bite, with much of its
bizarrely lackadaisacal rendering of Nazi Germany
epitomised by the mewling giddiness of Jojo’s
imaginary friend version of Adolf Hitler (Waititi).
To the extent that the film has a visual grammar
at all, it is rooted in bright, oversaturated colours
that nominally mimic the stylings of Wes Anderson.
Yet where Anderson’s own cinematic depiction of
fascism (2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel) cannily
played the director’s visual fussiness as a reflection
of the controlling ethos of Nazism, Waititi’s
functional style does nothing to approximate- much less comment upon – the atmosphere
of fascism.
Indeed, for a film that needs to illustrate the
systems that warped a child like Jojo from birth,
Jojo Rabbit paints a bafflingly unthreatening
vision of Nazi Germany. Jojo himself, virulently
antisemitic thanks to a lifetime of brainwashing
propaganda, is the only character to consistently
air a hatred and fear of Jews. Everyone else, more
preoccupied with Germany’s impending defeat,
couldn’t care less about them, from his young peers
to SS officers like Captain Klenzendorf, who at
first seems like the latest in a string of redemptive
racists for Sam Rockwell to play until it swiftly
becomes clear that the soldier has already become
disgusted with Nazi ideology and thus has no real
moral arc.
The unwillingness to depict the pervasive
hatred instilled in Nazi society even undermines
Jojo’s emotional journey when he discovers that a
Jew, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), is being hidden
in the attic by his mother (Scarlett Johansson).
Contriving to gain Elsa’s trust and lure her into a
false sense of comfort to turn her in, Jojo instead
engages in a budding romance with the girl, posing
as her missing fiancé and writing love letters
which ask a wryly amused Elsa to confirm the most
outlandish myths he’s heard about Jews. In theory,
Jojo’s rapidly warming, even smitten attitude
toward Elsa is a charming means of confronting the
absurdity of bigotry with flesh-and-blood human
connection, but in practice, Jojo’s attempts to keep
Elsa in his attic merely water down how racists are
often attracted to the very people they hate.
Any of these might have been at least partially
salvaged by some decent jokes, but Jojo Rabbit
runs almost entirely on goofy voices and twee
energy over actual punchlines. And only once is
the true menace of the Third Reich communicated
in the form of Stephen Merchant’s looming,
calmly authoritarian Gestapo agent. With no
bedrock of horror, and no comic insight into it,
Jojo Rabbit is a satire without purpose, a minor
titillation in setting that ultimately amounts
to little more than a slightly crooked rom-com.
JAKE COLEJojo Rabbit
L