Are
we allowed to laugh at the Nazis? Writer-director Taika Waititi certainly earns
brownie points for giving it a go. (Review by Patrick Compton. 7/10)
Charlie Chaplin took the mickey out of
Hitler in The Great Dictator; as did
Mel (“Springtime for Hitler”) Brooks in his movie, The Producers. And don’t forget that Italian writer-director
Roberto Benigni won the best actor Oscar as well as the Best Foreign Language
gong for Life is Beautiful in 1999.
None of which evades the fact that if
you’re going to satirize the Nazis, or even more dangerously, the Holocaust,
you’ve got to get your tone dead right. Even the slightest failure in this area
and you’ll be dead meat.
Does Taika Waititi achieve this in his
“anti-hate satire” about a 10-year-old Hitler Youth kid who’s “big into
swastikas” and has a fantasy friendship with Adolf Hitler? I think he does,
though there are a few sticky moments, and the Academy agreed last Sunday when
Waititi was awarded the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
An impressive Roman Griffin Davis plays
Jojo during the last days of the Third Reich as the Russians and Americans
approach Berlin. He’s thrilled to earn his spurs as a juvenile warrior at a
Hitler Youth summer camp where he communes with his fantasy friend, none other
than Adolf Hitler (Waititi plays the role, at least initially, as an amiable
fool). An accident with a hand grenade sends Jojo home where his German
resistance mother (Scarlett Johansson) has hidden a young Jewish girl (the
extraordinary Thomasin McKenzie, so good in her debut movie, Leave No Trace).
The action is always seen from the point of
view of Jojo (he gets the derisive “rabbit” surname because he refuses to snap
the neck of a bunny to prove his courage) and the tone ranges from farce to straight
comedy to a more conventional kind of drama as the film progresses.
It’s inevitable, perhaps, that people are
going to differ wildly in their responses to the film and I don’t want to
second-guess the reactions of audiences. But the film certainly tries to be
playful, satirical and morally well-intentioned.
The performances by Davis, Johansson and
McKenzie are top-notch, and they are joined by Archie Yates as Jojo’s pudgy
young friend, and Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson as comic-strip Nazis.
There were one or two moments, I felt, when
Waititi’s playful approach proved inadequate in the dark face of obvious evil,
as when resistance fighters are shown hanging from lampposts and I still have a
few reservations about the project which may – or may not – be resolved by
further thought.
There’s a nice musical touch with the movie
beginning and ending with the German versions of The Beatles’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Komm Gib Mir
Deine Hand) and David Bowie’s Heroes
(Helden) – both performed by the original artists.
Jojo
Rabbit is showing at the Gateway Mall. - Patrick
Compton
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