ika Waititi’s movie is conspicuously about the presence of good Nazis who, at critical moments, conducted their own forms of resistance from inside the institutions of power.
At last, the movie that Bialystock and Bloom, in “The Producers,” would have
they got out of prison and went legit. Whereas they turned their production of “Springtime for Hitler,” intended as pro-Nazi propaganda, into the world’s unfunniest comedy in pursuit of colossal failure, “Jojo Rabbit,” meant as an anti-Nazi spectacle, is the world’s unfunniest comedy made in pursuit of success. Even though the target of satire in “Jojo Rabbit” is clearly the Nazis, the movie sharply but unintentionally satirizes itself, as well as its makers and the movie industry at large that saw fit to produce, release, and acclaim it.
Although made by the celebrated writer and director Taika Waititi and released by a major studio, “Jojo Rabbit,” with its combination of extreme goofball humor (including a campily over-the-top caricature of Hitler, played by Waititi himself) and grim and earnest portrayal of the terrors of Germany’s genocidal tyranny, plays more the blinkered follies to which Hollywood and its potentates are susceptible.
The film is set in the last year of the Second World War, in a town in Germany where a ten-year-old boy, Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), an enthusiastic new member of the Hitler Youth, lives with his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson). Jojo’s father isn’t home—Rosie says that he’s away at war, but other adults tell Jojo that his father is a coward—and it’s revealed that he is suspected of being a deserter. Rosie, for her part, is quietly but determinedly hostile to the Nazi regime. Yet Jojo has decorated his room with a profusion of Nazi posters and memorabilia, and he’s often visited by his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi), who turns up in the boy’s moments of emotional need, bucking up his courage or assuaging his humiliations. (In his first appearance in the film, Hitler urges Jojo to “Heil” him more confidently.)
Jojo’s Hitler Youth brigade, uniformed and organized in the lighthearted tone of a scout troop from “Moonrise Kingdom,” is led by a trio of adults, Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), Fred Finkel (Alfie Allen), and Fräulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson), who express virulent, over-the-top mockeries and hatreds of Jews and lead the boys in a monstrous ritual of cruelty. In teaching them to kill for the Führer, they order one of the boys—Jojo—to take hold of a rabbit and snap its neck. Jojo can’t do it, and runs away to the taunts of one leader, who says that if he can’t kill a rabbit maybe he himself is a scared rabbit. The boys start in with a mocking singsong chant of “Jojo Rabbit,” which is where the movie’s title comes from—but while Jojo is running the imaginary Hitler appears beside him, to remind him that it’s good to be a rabbit, that rabbits are wise and cunning and live to fight another day.
But when Jojo is seriously wounded in a mishap with a grenade caused by his clumsy effort (backed by his imaginary friend, Hitler), he’s relegated to noncombat tasks such as putting up posters in town, and he starts spending a lot of time at home alone. Hearing a noise upstairs, he investigates, finds a cut in a wood panel, pries it open with his Hitler Youth knife, and discovers a space where a teen-age girl is hiding—or, rather, unbeknownst to him, is being hidden by Rosie. Jojo is scared when he finds her. He thinks that she’s a ghost; she denies it, and he asks, “What are you?” She answers, “A Jew,” and he responds, “Gesundheit.” This is the best joke in the movie.
The girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), was a friend of Jojo’s late sister, Inge. Despite Jojo’s inculcated hatred for Jews, the lonely and curious boy spends time with Elsa in the upstairs aerie, gleans bits and pieces of her life story, and, despite the difference in their ages (he’s ten, she’s around sixteen), he develops a crush on her (and displays it by writing letters in which he impersonates her former boyfriend, a Jewish resistance fighter named Nathan). Resistance is everywhere: Rosie is revealed, early on, to be more than just privately averse to Nazis: she’s an active, albeit (as far as the movie shows) nonviolent resister. When she and Jojo pass a gibbet in the town square where five ostensible traitors have been hanged, Jojo asks her what they did, and she answers, “What they could.” As proof of their so-called crime, the authorities have pinned small anti-Nazi handbills to their clothing; it turns out that Rosie is the source of those flyers.
No comments:
Post a Comment