Jojo Rabbit (dir. Taika Waititi, 2019) - Review

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With its blend of boyish adventure and simpering sentiment, Jojo Rabbit proffers a twee vision of everyday Nazism that somehow revolves around the 'good ones’, from chubby-cheeked Hitler Youth to flamboyantly camp army officers, whose quirky individualism poises them to dismantle fascism from within.

The film peddles a doctrine of saccharine liberal compromise, with thinly-veiled commentary on contemporary political divisions, focusing on the personal tragedies of its wilfully ‘innocent’ protagonist to excuse and downplay his ardent Nazism. Throwing out soupy, hand-wringing tidbits - absent father! bullied at school! physical injury! - commonly applied by right-wing tabloids to white mass shooters, Jojo Rabbit joins Joker in softening horrendous behavior on the basis of prior hurt, imploring us to remember that ‘not all Nazis’.

Mel Brooks, presumably Waitit’s model for outlandish yet searing political commentary, contextualised The Producers with the observation that “if I get on the soapbox it’ll be blown away in the wind, but if I do Springtime for Hitler it’ll never be forgotten (...) you can bring down totalitarian governments faster by using ridicule than you can with invective”. By toothlessly aping Brooks’ dark subject matter without the latter’s comedic chutzpah, the film ultimately makes itself and the glib Hollywood apparatus the butt of the joke, in an ironic fulfillment of the very scenario mocked in The Producers. Mel Brooks’ marriage of Nazism and comedy played on American moral smugness, and the obliviousness of the entertainment industry to its real-world subjects. With its sickly polarities of zany, self-indulgent silliness (embodied in Waititi’s performance as Hitler) and patronising reminders that ‘Nazism bad’ (culminating in the execution of Jojo’s mother, a Not-Like-Other-Girls Aryan fantasy) Jojo Rabbit showcased Hollywood’s oblivious liberal pontification over a year before the infamous ‘Imagine’ lockdown video restated the point.

Jojo (Roman Griffith Davis), the eponymous vessel for the film’s sentiment of self-excusing white fragility, is the kind of bland, self-doubting little template onto which authors of boyish adventures have long invited their audiences to project themselves. Like potato in a kartoffelsalat, this flavourless little morsel draws smidgens of piquancy from his surroundings - from a Hitler Youth camp, staffed by Rebel Wilson; from his imaginary friend, the Führer, characterised with the puppyish Germanic squawking which Waititi honed in What We Do In The Shadows; and from Elsa (Thomasin McKenszie), the Jewish girl his ditzy single mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) has hidden in their walls.

Waititi aims for Mel Brooks levels of lunacy to deal with the racist and genocidal subject matter, but fails to attain it beyond the tired sonic punchline of a German accent (no one in the film comes close to reaching the giddy heights of Lili von Schtupp). Alas, most of the film’s comedic value derives from the glaring idiocy of its premise, as a clownishly simplistic morality play about Nazis which uses its sole Jewish character to invoke sympathy for, erm, Nazis.

Jojo Rabbit is best when it steps off the soapbox, thanks to a cast whose eccentricity feels as meticulously contrived as the rest of the film. Stephen Merchant’s trademark physical quirkiness (a lanky 6’7” frame and piercing green eyes) is put to disconcerting use in portraying the head of the local SS; their raid on Jojo’s home is a tense, claustrophobic blend of courteous weirdness and thinly veiled danger accented by the comic incongruity.

The film’s attempts to balance infantile kitsch with moral pronouncements on Nazi genocide flounder in the face of its jaw-dropping insoucience, imbuing it with an overwhelming sense of self-congratulation which reaches its nauseating apogee in the inexplicably Oscar-nominated performance of Scarlett Johansson. Rosie, a saintly Aryan saviour with a German accent as dodgy and cringe-inducing as her dialogue, is a sentient ‘Live, Love, Laugh’ wall decal. “Life is a gift,” she minces; “we must celebrate it. We must dance.” When Hitler commits suicide, Germany is defeated, and Jojo discovers that now-hanged Rosie had been part of the resistance, this stunning and brave philosophical pronouncement is approvingly codified by its transposition into the mouths of moral authorities: Elsa, the token Jewish character-slash-plot-device, and, most eye-rollingly of all, Romantic poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

The film ends with Elsa and her cuddly pint-sized Nazi pal bopping away to David Bowie, the laziest of auditory shorthand for quirky, blithe postwar liberalism; congratulations, we’ve solved racism! The audience aren’t even safe when the screen fades to black: line by line, we’re encouraged to “let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” This is possibly the least helpful suggestion one could offer either to the Nazis’ millions of victims, or to anyone averse to the return of mainstream fascism; eventually it is revealed as a Rilke quote, taken totally out of context to legitimize Rosie’s platitudes, the cherry on top of a sickly, sweeping confection of humanist vapidity for the ‘digital activist’ age.

Áine Kennedy is a London-based writer and manager of the ScriptUp blog.