Film review

Taika Waititi (2019)

In Jojo Rabbit, set in Germany in the last days of the Third Reich, a ten-year-old boy called Johannes ‘Jojo’ Betzler is a passionate admirer of Adolf Hitler, who is also the boy’s exuberantly comical imaginary friend.   Things get complicated when Jojo discovers that his mother Rosie is hiding Elsa Korr, a Jewish teenager, in the Betzlers’ house.  While Elsa remains undiscovered, Rosie’s other work for the Resistance comes to light and she’s murdered by the Gestapo.  Her death brings Jojo and Elsa warily closer together.  The climax is a battle between German and Allied forces in the streets of the (unnamed) town where Jojo lives.  At this point, having learned that the real Hitler is dead, Jojo kicks the imaginary one out of an upstairs window.  Fearful of being alone, he then tells Elsa that Germany has won the war.  She discovers the truth when she ventures out onto the street and sees American flags flying.  Elsa slaps Jojo for lying to her before the two of them break into a zany dance together, to David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ (sung in German).

Black comedy takes nerve and integrity to get right – that is, be funny and intellectually persuasive.  Sentimental black comedy is, almost by definition, proof of failure and Jojo Rabbit, which doesn’t make you smile inside or out, is an aberration.  Although it takes a while for the tone of Taika Waititi’s film to shift into but-seriously schmaltz, the set-up doesn’t make sense from the start.  A prologue sees Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) excitedly preparing for his first Hitler Youth training camp.   The opening titles then appear against archive news film of real German children beaming and cheering as they behold Hitler (with the Beatles’ ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’, in German, on the soundtrack).  The man himself doesn’t appear on the screen but his comedy avatar, in the form of Waititi, soon does – romping around with Jojo in his bedroom, asking him to ‘give me a Heil’, and so on.  They’re on first name terms.  But why would a child who idolises the Führer imagine him as a loopy playmate?  Especially when Jojo has an actual friend, fellow Hitler fan Yorki (Archie Yates).  He too is meant to be a laugh, chiefly because he’s a fat specky four eyes.

The portrayal of Hitler as a big, daft kid is meant to reinforce Jojo Rabbit‘s satire of Nazism – a strain of satire more easily said than done.  This is the first film I’ve seen by the New Zealander Taika Waititi, who won praise for his horror mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and Marvel Studios‘ Thor: Ragnarok (2017).   According to Wikipedia, Waititi, who has a Maori father and mixed Irish and Russian Jewish heritage on his mother’s side, describes himself as a ‘Polynesian Jew‘.  Perhaps he thinks he’s ethnically well qualified to take on this project – following in the footsteps of Mel Brooks, who said, in relation to The Producers, that ‘by using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths’.  There’s a gulf, though, between Jojo Rabbit and The Producers.  The latter is set not in Nazi Germany but in a Jewish metropolitan enclave, post-war New York theatreland, where all the characters – Jews and Gentiles, including an unreconstructed Nazi playwright and a stage representation of Hitler – are the butt of jokes.

Thomasin McKenzie, so good last year in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, plays Elsa with humour as well as sensitivity.  Even so, from the moment she appears, Waititi seems to intend this Jewish girl to stand heroically outside the comic framework of his story:  you can – indeed, should – make Hitler an object of ridicule but you shouldn’t make light of his victims’ ordeals.  This approach can’t fail to throw Jojo Rabbit out of whack.   Once the bold decision has been taken to turn the prime mover behind the Holocaust into a laughing stock, it’s counterproductive to exempt other characters from the comedy.  The main effect of treating Elsa’s plight seriously is to make Waititi’s cartoon lampoon of Hitler intolerable.

I knew beforehand that Waititi’s screenplay was an adaptation.  As I watched Jojo Rabbit, I wondered if the source material was a graphic novel – a medium that compels stylisation and thereby a degree of consistency.  The source is a ‘blackly comic’ novel, Caging Skies, by Christine Leunens, published in 2008, but there’s nothing to suggest it’s a graphic one.  The novel does, however, have a potential unifying mechanism:  Johannes is the first-person (and an unreliable) narrator of his story.  It’s bound to be more difficult to keep control of this kind of material once you place it in more or less realistic locations rather than inside a particular individual’s head.  It doesn’t help either that the film’s visual style is oddly bland.  There are Gothic script touches to the lettering of the titles but that’s about as far as Waititi gets to stylising, and the deliberately anachronistic dialogue makes you feel you’re watching a put-on.  Adolf, who asks for his ‘Heil’ in give-me-five style, tells Jojo to ‘get your shit together’ and ignore detractors:  ‘People used to say a lot of nasty things about me.  “Oh, this guy’s a lunatic – oh, look at that psycho!  He’s gonna get us all killed!”‘  The Deutsches Jungvolk training weekend promises, says Jojo, to ‘be intense’.

It turns out a disaster.  Instructed to break a captive rabbit’s neck to prove his ‘courage’, Jojo can’t do it and is ridiculed by the other kids as ‘Jojo Rabbit’.  He tries to make amends by throwing a hand grenade, which bounces off a tree and explodes at his feet, leaving Jojo with facial scars and a limp.  Adolf tells him he’s ‘still the bestest, most loyal little Nazi I’ve ever met’ but Jojo, when he gets out of hospital, is reduced to propaganda leafleting duties.  This doesn’t stop him being rabidly anti-semitic but Elsa, on the receiving end, calmly perceives he’s not really a Nazi – ‘You’re a ten-year-old kid who likes dressing up in a funny uniform and wants to be part of a club’.  Jojo is isolated, for sure (though he’d be less isolated if he wasn’t so dismissive of Yorki).  His absent father, who Jojo thinks is fighting for the Fatherland in Italy, is actually working for the Resistance.  Jojo’s elder sister, Inge, recently died of influenza.  Elsa, a former classmate of hers, is holed up in what was Inge’s bedroom.

I’ve not read (and won’t be reading) Caging Skies so this is only speculation but Christine Leunens, by describing a world entirely from Johannes’s point of view, may have been able to ascribe the boy’s Nazi ambitions and fantasy to his particular, needful circumstances more plausibly than Waititi’s film does.  On screen, the focus on a cutely eccentric child (well but rather knowingly played by Roman Griffin Davis) and an infantilised version of Hitler combine to present Nazism as a function of immaturity.   As American and Soviet troops descend on the town, Yorki tells Jojo, ‘I’m going home to my mother – I need a cuddle’.  With the hapless Jojo and Yorki as its representatives, there’s no real malice in the Hitler Youth – as if it were just a foolish phase that German kids went through, then grew out of.

The training camp is run by one-eyed Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell) – a louche, sinister joker at the start of proceedings.  As a result of the grenade incident, Klenzendorf is demoted to administrative duties in the town and becomes another figure of fun.  Jojo’s mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) arrives to see him.  Blaming Klenzendorf for her son’s injuries, she knees him in the balls before demanding that he find jobs that Jojo can do.  (It’s a struggle to understand why a woman prepared to risk her life by hiding a Jewish girl in her home would continue to indulge her son’s Nazism to the extent that Rosie does.  The idea is presumably that it’s a blind for her own Resistance activities but the real explanation is that she has to do it for the sake of the plot.)   In the closing stages, Klenzendorf undergoes a major character change.   First, he covers for Elsa when, on a visit to the house from a Gestapo official (Stephen Merchant) and his henchmen, she pretends to be Inge but makes a mistake about her date of birth.  Once the Russian soldiers descend, they round up German captives, including Jojo and Klenzendorf.  After telling the boy that Rosie was a good woman, Klenzendorf sacrifices his own life to save Jojo’s.

This personality transplant is the most blatant instance of Jojo Rabbit’s shift into genuinely heartwarming (or that’s the idea) territory but Klenzendorf exposes a weakness of the film well before this happens.  There’s a challenge in setting the story at a point in World War II when eventual defeat for Germany was becoming inevitable.  (In one of his exchanges with Jojo, Hitler mentions the von Stauffenberg plot ‘last year’.)  Taika Waititi is either unwilling or unable to show Jojo’s infatuation with the Führer as pathetically late in the day – but he does show Jojo taking a shine to Klenzendorf and wanting to be in his good books.  The boy agrees not to tell the authorities about Elsa on condition that she tells him her ‘Jew secrets’ so that he can put together a kind of dossier to please Klenzendorf.  In his early scenes, Sam Rockwell seems to be channelling Nazi crazies of the screen including Peter Sellers’s Dr Strangelove and Kenneth Mars’s Franz Liebkind, the demented author of ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in The Producers.  Rockwell adds something of his own too, though, and he’s resourceful enough to keep adjusting to the changes the script demands of him.  He’s more credible as a weirdly charismatic father figure for Jojo than Taika Waititi’s Adolf is an imagined best mate.  Once Klenzendorf is in the picture, Hitler seems surplus to Jojo’s requirements.

Others in the cast aren’t required to go through the character contortions that Sam Rockwell does.  The performances – of Scarlett Johansson, Stephen Merchant, Alfie Allen (as Klenzendorf’s sidekick) and Rebel Wilson (as the brutally demented Fräulein Rahm, another Nazi youth instructor) – are coherent in themselves but illustrations of an incoherent scheme:  these characters belong in different films.   The most memorable image in Jojo Rabbit is of people hanged by the regime and whose corpses remain on public view in the town square.  Waititi shows just the dangling legs – a pair of trousers, a pair of stockings.  The first time Jojo sees the display, he’s with his mother and asks her what these people did.  Rosie replies, ‘They did their best’.  (Needless to say, she doesn’t expand on this and her son doesn’t ask further questions.)  The second time Jojo sees corpses on the gallows, one of them is his mother’s.  He hugs her legs, weeping.   The moment is mawkish rather than moving but the intention to move is evidence enough of how tonally erratic the film has become.

The Rilke quote that Taika Waititi puts up on the screen at the end is, in a way, an admission of this:  ‘Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final’.  In another way, it’s confirmation of this picture’s high opinion of itself.  There’s a double meaning to Jojo’s telling Elsa, as Germany is defeated, that it’s not safe for her to come out of hiding.  The boy lies about the outcome of the 1939-45 war because he needs Elsa to stay put but it’s hard to resist the suspicion that Waititi also thinks he’s telling a truth here:  that, as the 2010s end, lethal racial and cultural hatred is once again rampant – as if Nazism did prevail.  It’s remarkable how morally self-important commercial film-makers can be.  No denying there’s plenty of hate around these days but how many mainstream movies are actively promoting it?  Yet Jojo Rabbit is being sold as an ‘anti-hate satire’, as if the concept were radical and daring.

29 December 2019