Jojo Rab­bit

Ludi­crous­ly 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 indoc­tri­nat­ed 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 lack­adaisi­cal 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 fiancé́ 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.