JOJO RABBIT

  • 05 Oct - 11 Oct, 2019
  • Mag The Weekly
  • Reviews

With every cycle of serious war films comes counter-narratives, serving to offer critique, explore and exploit those filmic styles; Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit is a rude, flippant and aggressive comedic, stylised to take on a period in history.

There is a raucous, audience-pleasing outrageousness to the way its writer-director, New Zealander Taika Waititi, goes about his business, beginning with his opening gambit of comparing the rise of Hitler to the outbreak of Beatlemania via his use of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Also most helpful at the outset are the resourceful comic skills of Sam Rockwell, as his Captain Klenzendorf indoctrinates his recruits in such basic Hitler Youth skills as book burning, grenade throwing and killing, starting with a rabbit which isn’t too easy for the 10-year-old German Jojo Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) and he ultimately suffers a facial injury that gets him cashiered and sent home. “Adolf” (played by director Waititi with exuberant comic energy) who is the boy’s closest playtime companion persists in his hate lessons there, hardly leaving the kid alone and trying with some urgency to shape him into a full-blown Nazi. With Jojo’s absorption of the ideology evidently complete, the boy is incensed to discover that his glamorous mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), is hiding a young Jewish woman, Elsa Korr (Thomasin McKenzie) in a cramped storage area upstairs. It takes a while, but Elsa has an eventual salutary effect upon Jojo’s indoctrinated beliefs, teaching him a thing or three about Judaism and, just as important, opening him up to different ways of seeing than those of his pal Adolf. Still, there is a heavy price paid along the way due to Elsa’s presence at the house.

Just as it was easy to like 1999 multiple Oscar winner Life Is Beautiful, it was even easier to dislike it, and the same holds true for Jojo Rabbit. The brash way in which the film plays extreme Nazi views for laughs and then twists them for emotional dividends will once again divide the public, and it’s quite likely that younger viewers won’t be bothered by the film’s fast and loose attitude. To the contrary, it has a choreographed, rock 'n' roll ending.

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