Review by Zach Dennis
At this point, Hitler really isn’t that funny.
Now, it isn’t because we’re so constricted now that we can’t lampoon the famed dictator, but more that it has been done again and again and again and again — and better than this. Start with Chaplin in The Great Dictator and move through To Be or Not To Be or The Producers: I think we’ve thoroughly stuck it to the pencil-thin mustached leader.
So what Taika Waititi is doing in Jojo Rabbit is not so much terrible and moreso just uninventive — something that could be viewed as a searing indictment on a director that has been heralded for his inventiveness through his work to date: Eagle v. Shark, Boy, What We Do in the Shadows and The Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
Either way, Jojo Rabbit isn’t the blistering middle finger to Nazism and its modern day evocations that Waititi would probably like it to be, instead, it is yet another example of the nearly fetishistic fascination with lampooning the German national socialist movement of the early 1900s by relying on its symbols rather than its ideology or acts.
Jojo Rabbit’s titular character earns his name when he doesn’t follow through with killing a rabbit — despite the jeering and pressuring from his young commanders at Hitler Youth camp — and becomes seen as much more soft in the eyes of his Nazi superiors than he would like to be. Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) desperately wants to fit in with the Nazis. He’s so dedicated that his imaginary friend is their leader — Adolf Hitler (played by Taika Waititi) — and he tells everyone in his town, including his mother (Scarlett Johansson) how much of a good Nazi he is going to be.
His talk falls short in camp after a faulty choice to be in the area of a bomb explosion earns him a trip to the hospital and relief from any military duties in the battlefield. From here, he works in an office in town with a few of his commanders — all demoted for poor conduct watching the children in the camp — such as Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson) and Finkel (Alfie Allen).
Due to his new position, Jojo spends a lot of time at home and discovers a secret of his mother’s — a young Jewish girl named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) is living behind the wall boards of his late sister’s room. Initially, Jojo spends his time threatening Elsa, because as a Nazi-in-training, he has to assert his authority to the movement’s number one enemy, but the posturing doesn’t work. Eventually, the two settle into spending time together or as Jojo (with the aid of imaginary Hitler) sees it as a chance to learn and document observations on the enemy.
This sets up a lot of the distance Jojo Rabbit wants to make between actual Nazis and the Nazis inhabiting its world. The film is very aware of what makes a Nazi a Nazi — the swastika, the uniform, the accent and the salute are easy signifiers of the most-recognizable villains in human history. But by reveling in this, it gives itself a pass to not interrogate what it really means to be a Nazi and the atrocities that come with it – namely the Holocaust, which is but a whisper (if that) among the narrative.
It’s easy to see what Waititi is trying to do — implementing his style of comedy and commentary to show how absurd and silly the Nazis were, but this brings everything back to the starting point — but we already knew that.
What Jojo Rabbit doesn’t understand — as do many other modern Nazis stories — is that the surface of the Nazis isn’t lost on the public. If anything, we have superseded that into becoming the token “bad guy” for most pop culture stories since the 1950s or 60s. The real threat of the Nazis comes through their white supremacist ideology and the ways they chose to implement cleansing the rest of the world to fulfill this. So, again, Jojo Rabbit isn’t terrible because its is playing with Hitler as the comedic partner to the film’s main character; it is bad because it shows a base level and limited understanding of what needs to be deconstructed and mocked from the Nazis.
Everyone knows (or should) that the Nazis are bad, but the actual points to mock are too real, too scaring and too visceral to mine any comedy from (just ask Roberto Benigni or Jerry Lewis). And unless you’re going to reckon with that, you aren’t saying anything at all.