Jojo Rabbit is a hard movie to calibrate your expectations for.
That's not to say the story is complex. It's the story of a Hitler youth at the
end of WWII discovering that his mother has been hiding a young Jewish girl in
their attic. What's hard about it is that no matter how I describe it, you'll
probably come away from it expecting the wrong tone. But that's kind of the
point of these Reactions, so I might at well try.
It's easiest to think of Jojo Rabbit as a
comedy. After all, it's a movie where writer/director Taika Waititi plays Adolf
Hitler as the imaginary friend of a boy named Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), and
beginning to end, Nazis a treated like fools and with incredible contempt. No
one is coming away from this movie more pro-Nazi than they came in. Waititi has
a gift for finding laughs in awkward places.They aren't uncomfortable laughs as
much as they are laughs in places that aren't always obvious. This is the same guy who turned a horror
movie into a comedy by focusing on the banalities of eternal existence (What
We Do in the Shadows) and made the most overtly comedic MCU movie (Thor:
Ragnarok) by accepting that the secret identity of most superhero movies is
that they are really ideas for a comedy. Jojo Rabbit is a very funny
movie once you get used to where the laughs are. I especially enjoyed Sam
Rockwell as a washed-up German captain who is weary of the war after an injury
takes him off the front lines. And Waititi is a world-class scene-stealer in
small roles.
This isn't a straight comedy though. The jokes are
there for you to let your guard down. Shit gets real the further into the movie
you get. Much like The Death of Stalin last year, Jojo Robbit
often reframes jokes so that you appreciate the horror of realizing that people
really took these things seriously. It's a balancing act the movie mostly pulls
off. It doesn't abandon the jokes late though. It doesn't go from comedy to
drama. It goes from being a comedy to being just as much a comedy but also a
drama. As I said, it's hard to explain.
Jojo Rabbit does a couple things incredibly well. This is the best
that Scarlett Johannson (as Jojo's Allied-sympathizing mother) has been in
years*. The movie doesn't try to make Jojo's budding friendship with Elsa, the
Jewish girl he discovers - played by Thomasin McKenzie who was wonderful in
last year's Leave No Trace - neat. Jojo's indoctrination is too deep to
go away entirely. By the time the movie ends, you believe he'll eventually get
to a good place, but he's not there yet.
*Note: I haven't seen Marriage Story yet.
My favorite aspect of the movie is how smartly it
handles Jojo's indoctrination. 10-year-olds aren't complex thinkers. I'm
certainly embarrassed by a lot of things I believed when I was 10. If the right
adult told me something, I'd believe nearly anything. Cynicism tends to come
with puberty. Jojo's imaginary Hitler is a role written by a 10-year-old. His
reasoning is childish and fanciful. Jojo still believes in monsters, so when
everyone calls the Jews monsters, he liberalizes it. It doesn't necessarily
excuse how awful Jojo is to Elsa, but it's easier for her to deflect his words,
knowing that he has no ability to digest nuance. Then with the adults, it's
easy to see how their prejudices come from a more cynical place. They're in the
war mostly because it would be more difficult to take the other side. It's not
about a well-reasoned stance. The movie intelligently navigates what hate looks
like on the macro and mico scale.
I fall a little short of loving this movie, despite
how hard it hit me at certain points. It doesn't seamlessly shift between
comedy and drama. Far too often, I could tell when a joke was setting me up for
an abrupt shift to something severe. A lot of jokes fell short of being funny
enough to be dark comedy. You see, in a dark comedy, the idea is that you laugh
because you can't help it, and that laugh covers up your groan. That's why
people say "I shouldn't laugh at that" while enjoying a dark comedy.
If the joke doesn't work well enough to make you laugh though, then the movie
gets difficult sit through. Failed dark humor often comes off as mean or
ignorant, which is why dark comedies end up so polarizing*. Unsurprisingly, Jojo
Rabbit has received a somewhat mixed response. It's weird to call this
movie a crowd-pleaser, but that's what it is. It has touches of coming-of-age
and is about the strengths and weaknesses of having a childlike understanding
of things. When you are 10, you are quicker to hate and quicker to love. Jojo
Rabbit wants to believe that love will win out.
*In other words, Heathers is either an insightful
deconstruction of high school or an ugly movie that gets off on violence
depending on how funny you find it.
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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