Jojo Rabbit – first look review | Little White Lies

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Jojo Rab­bit – first look review

09 Sep 2019

Words by Hannah Strong

Two soldiers in the air, surrounded by other soldiers in a forest setting.
Two soldiers in the air, surrounded by other soldiers in a forest setting.
Tai­ka Wait­i­ti plays an imag­i­nary Adolf Hitler in this chron­i­cal­ly soft-edged, wannabe satir­i­cal comedy.

The words An Anti-Hate Satire’ are embla­zoned across the poster for Jojo Rab­bit, the new film by Tai­ka Wait­i­ti. It seems like a weird thing to spec­i­fy when the tar­get of said polit­i­cal fun­nies is actu­al Nazis. Because if it were ever per­fect­ly rea­son­able to hate any­one, it’s those respon­si­ble for the sys­tem­at­ic geno­cide of mil­lions. More than like­ly it’s intend­ed as a wry mis­sive from the King of Kiwi Com­e­dy, but a more fit­ting tagline might be An Anti-Humour Satire’ giv­en how woe­ful­ly unfun­ny it is.

Wait­i­ti has turned his hand to super­hero block­busters (Thor: Rag­narok), vam­pire mock­u­men­taries (What We Do In the Shad­ows) and touch­ing odd­ball drame­dies (Hunt for the Wilder­peo­ple), each result­ing in a sur­feit of charm. His dis­tinc­tive brand of droll­ness, allied with a pen­chant for bright colours and gen­uine warmth, has land­ed him a very sol­id fil­mog­ra­phy so far, and since Thor, made him a glob­al phenomenon. 

At the world pre­mière of Jojo Rab­bit, one woman in the audi­ence wouldn’t stop shout­ing out to him, appar­ent­ly just over­whelmed to be in his pres­ence. When his lat­est project was announced, it raised a few eye­brows, and per­haps smiles – Wait­i­ti had cast him­self as Adolf Hitler in a black com­e­dy about a young boy in Nazi Ger­many who is forced to eval­u­ate his beliefs in the dying days of the World War Two.

Tak­ing straight from the Chap­lin play­book, Waititi’s Hitler is a Mr Bean-esque fig­ure, hammed up to eleven as the invis­i­ble friend of young Jojo Bet­zler (Roman Grif­fin Davis). He leaps around, talks in a thick approx­i­ma­tion of a Ger­man accent and encour­ages young Jojo to be the best lit­tle Nazi in the whole of the Third Reich. He is, undoubt­ed­ly, the worst thing about the film – dis­tract­ing and one-note. It is pos­si­ble to par­o­dy Hitler suc­cess­ful­ly, but in lean­ing too heav­i­ly on basic mock­ery, there’s noth­ing new that this per­for­mance brings to the table.

Four people dressed in Nazi-era German military uniforms, standing in a room with wooden furniture.

New­com­er Grif­fin Davis fares bet­ter as Jojo, as does Thomasin McKen­zie as Elsa, a young Jew­ish girl who Jojo slow­ly befriends despite their dif­fer­ences (turns out some Jews aren’t so bad after all). The pair are charm­ing and dis­play an easy chem­istry, but the emo­tion­al beats they’re com­pelled to hit are over­ly famil­iar. So too is Sam Rock­well as yet anoth­er white suprema­cist; this time he’s Cap­tain Klet­zen­dorf, a dis­il­lu­sioned Nazi offi­cer who knows Jojo’s moth­er Rosie (Scar­lett Johans­son, with an excel­lent wardrobe and a dodgy accent) and takes her son under his wing fol­low­ing an acci­dent he’s par­tial­ly respon­si­ble for.

There are brief flash­es of some­thing worth­while – one late scene feels gen­uine­ly dar­ing in light of the film’s oth­er­wise jovial tone, but it takes so long to get there, it’s almost com­plete­ly lost. Wait­i­ti has nev­er shied away from shar­ing his pol­i­tics, but Jojo Rab­bit feels odd­ly impar­tial, keen to note that actu­al­ly, there were some Nice Nazis Too. That’s not real­ly some­thing we need to hear in 2019, with white nation­al­ism back in vogue and on the march across much of west­ern civilisation. 

Nazis still exist, and they don’t need bet­ter PR. It feels like a sad­ly missed oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate some­thing more rad­i­cal and chal­leng­ing. Instead, the film hides behind cheap slap­stick and, in the end, only offers a trite Be kind to each oth­er’ moral. We might like to think that kind­ness always wins the day, but with no inter­ro­ga­tion of why Jojo and count­less oth­er impres­sion­able young kids choose hate over love, it’s not enough to just deliv­er a banal les­son about kind­ness win­ning the day. You have to under­stand hate (or at least where it comes from) in order to effec­tive­ly fight it.

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