*My review of Jojo Rabbit was originally published on Film Inquiry. Click here to read the original post and check out more great reviews from this awesome site!*
Regardless of whether it deserves attention or not, Taika Waititi‘s Jojo Rabbit is destined to be one of the most talked-about films of this awards season. In fact, its status as a lightning rod of controversy was practically preordained from its initial announcement — how could a satire featuring a goofy, imaginary version of Adolf Hitler (played by Waititi himself) not generate a good deal of discussion? By dealing with Nazism and the horrors of the Third Reich in a semi-serious, semi-farcical manner, Jojo Rabbit plants its feet firmly in tricky, dangerous, and potentially brilliant territory.
And then it drops the ball.
Young Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is, by all accounts, a Nazi fanboy; a jubilant, brainwashed member of the Hitler Youth. The war is nearing the beginning of the end, but Jojo still faithfully believes every word that comes out of the mouths of his Nazi superiors — even the dopey Captain Kletzendorf (Sam Rockwell) and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson). Jojo is so enamored with this culture of fascism and fanaticism that Hitler is actually his imaginary best friend, a silly source of encouragement when his fellow fanatics belittle him. Unfortunately, this courage sometimes gets the young boy in trouble — in one of the film’s better moments of deadpan humor, Jojo accidentally blows himself up with a grenade after a bit of prodding from his imaginary friend.
The scarring from the grenade blast leaves Jojo at home for a while, where he lives with his mother, the kind and loving Rosie (Scarlett Johansson). What Jojo doesn’t know is that his mother is hiding a big secret in the walls of their peaceful German home — a teenage Jewish girl by the name of Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). This, of course, completely rocks the young boy’s world.
Jojo Rabbit is always trying to pull off a billion different tones and moods at once, but it is consistent in one regard: it is profoundly unfunny from start to finish. There are a few laughs, sure, but Waititi makes the mistake of scraping the bottom of the barrel, fishing for the easiest and broadest laughs when something more precise would have sufficed. You’ve heard every one of these Nazi jokes before, and few of them feel novel or especially clever in the context. While Jojo Rabbit naturally operates in a mode of silly exaggeration, its absurdist treatment of the material — its emphasis on Jojo’s extreme internalization of Nazi ideology, its reliance on caricatures of Nazis — is never insightful or amusing. Even Waititi‘s starring role as Hitler, which remains the film’s boldest conceit, falls entirely flat.
Jojo Rabbit‘s first two acts are utterly insufferable, so desperate for laughs and so basic and labored in its execution that the idea of anyone finding this controversial or risky becomes the funniest thing about it. The finale is more interesting, yet it makes its failures as a film more pronounced. While it never totally does away with the cutesy nonsense, Jojo Rabbit does eventually become a more serious and emotionally resonant film. Jojo receives a rude awakening, and Waititi essentially tracks the ramifications of the young boy’s earth-shattering epiphany for the remainder of the running time. The results are occasionally effective, and young stars Davis and McKenzie do their best to make their forced friendship click.
Frustratingly, the film’s path from blind faith to a stark encounter with the truth never fully captures the scope of Nazism’s horrors. There are few mentions of the Holocaust or mass genocide; the most horrific event is only portrayed as horrific because it connects directly to Jojo. I understand that, in a PG-13 film aimed at teenagers and kids, it’s difficult to depict the true bleakness and inhumanity of the Nazis. But if the content of a film expressly about Nazi Germany can’t fully reckon with its grave sins, maybe it was a bad idea from the start.
THE FINAL GRADE: D+ (3.8/10)
Images courtesy of Fox Searchlight
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