Film Review - Jojo Rabbit (12A)

You're not a Nazi, Jojo. You're a ten-year-old kid who likes dressing up in a funny uniform and wants to be part of a club.

Adolf Hitler and Nazism were first lampooned on screen in Charles Chaplin's 1940 comedy The Great Dictator. Nearly three decades later, the world having grasped the true horrors of the Nazi regime, Mel Brooks went there again in The Producers, then ingulged in similar mockery via 1984's To Be Or Not To Be. Ridiculing the Fuhrer and his intended Master Race, in other words, is nothing new. Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi's swipe at all things Third Reich, is no doubt in response to a depressing global resurgence of far-right sentiment and can't be faulted in its intentions. Whether it fully succeeds as a film is a different question.

Inspired by Christine Leunens' 2008 novel Caging Skies, the film centres on Johannes (Jojo), a young German lad so fixated on succeeding in the Hitler Youth juniors that his imaginary friend is the organisation's bizarrely-moustached founder himself (played with relish by Waititi). However Jojo's situation is compromised when he discovers that his mother is hiding Elsa, a Jewish teenager, in the family home. With his personal inner Hitler providing dubious advice (a kind of Fascist Jiminy Cricket), Jojo is torn between what his Jungvolk ideology is telling him and a slowly growing connection with Elsa.

A film like Jojo Rabbit works (or doesn't) on how well its disparate elements blend together. This is in essense a wacky satire on totalitarianism with brash, primary colour design throughout, but it also embraces sentimentality and tragedy. Waititi makes for a zany tyrant - all furious mugging and ungainly physicality - but that zaniness spills too far into the film's real world. Moments of Monty Python-level surrealism - like an insane one inside the Hitler Youth HQ - tore me out of the film's world with no easy way back in, so that other starkly serious revelations didn't work like they should have. It also needs saying that a great-sounding comic conceit - like a young lad's lunatic version of Hitler - can wear thin very quickly. While it's initially amusing to see Waititi lolloping in slo-mo through with woods on a Yungvolk training exercise, the effect simply doesn't sustain. Thank goodness then that the comedy-Fuhrer is used sparingly.

Elsewhere the comi-serious balance is struck to better effect. Sam Rockwell (wouldn't you know) is nicely understated in his performance as the war-and-world-weary Klenzendorf, visibly sagging under his demotion to Captain of the Yungvolk. Scarlett Johansson has both warmth and a colourful splash of eccentricity as the mother trying to redeem Jojo discreetly from the clutches of a toxic ideology. And Stephen Merchant injects a surprising element of menace into the broad comedy of Gestapo Captain Deertz. But supplying most of the film's biggest laughs is young Archie Yates as Jojo's earnest friend Yorki. Every unwittingly funny declaration is made with deadpan of a comedy natural, so expect to see him again - soon.

Then there's the heart of the drama, falling squarely on the shoulders of Roman Griffith Davis - another screen novice - as Jojo. He carries the responsibility commendably well. There's innate likeability, yet he also conveys the chill of youthful fanaticism in his early encounters with the secret house-guest. Thomasin McKenzie as Elsa provides a fine counterpoint, capitalising on all the promise she showed in 2018's survivalist drama Leave No Trace. Everything she does exudes realness and the result is an affecting rapport between our young Hitler-fan and the stranger he's been taught to fear.

 

The film which sprang to mind most readily when watching Jojo Rabbit was 1997's Life is Beautiful, the Chaplin-esque romantic comedy that morphed disconcertingly into a Holocaust drama. Both it and Jojo courted the controversy of treating this darkest of subject-matter with levity. Setting that ideological issue aside, however, it's the 1997 movie that works better - largely because its lead performance (remember Roberto Benigni?) knits the contrasting aspects successfully together. Here those aspects clash too much for Jojo's story to be fully satisfying. Some of it is touching, some of it funny - but it doesn't blend. Waikiki's satirical aims are noble, but ultimately the movie doesn't achieve the sum of its frequently admirable parts.

Gut Reaction: Laughter - yes, misty eyes - yes. But also that sense of not laughing enough, or being shocked enough, or being moved quite enough. Although maybe that's just me.

Memorable Moment: A foreshadowed shock I should have seen coming - but didn't.

Ed's Verdict: 7/10. In an era where all kinds of race-hatred are reasserting themselves, Jojo is well-intentioned and welcome. If it doesn't hold together the way I wanted, it's got lots of lovely individual bits.