Jojo Rabbit, a film written & directed by Taika Waititi. 2019.
Light Spoilers (not any major plot points)
Contrary to what the trailer and media outrage may have led you to believe, Jojo Rabbit is not a movie about Hitler. Yeah, he’s technically listed as a character. But does a physical manifestation of how deep toxic nationalism can seep into your psyche and how hard it is to separate it from your true self really count as a character?
No. Not to me, at least.
This movie is about good people, and bad people, and all those people in between. It’s about the ones doing the best they can in a situation where others are doing their worst. It’s about the little acts of resistance against larger acts of horror. It’s about the people who choose to be human in an inhumane world.
And it’s about the strength it takes to do so.
It just so happens to take place in Nazi Germany – although a more carefully-constructed, colorful, comedic one than we might be used to seeing onscreen. Part of that is writer and director Taika Waititi’s personal decision to use comedy as an illustrative force, hoping to shine light on very real terrors by aggrandizing the past insanity that maybe some of the world has started to forget, and the other is his choice to focus the film on a child’s rose-colored view of war.
That child is Jojo Rabbit, played impeccably by the young Roman Griffin Davis, a ten-year-old kid who just wants to fit in to this world that doesn’t yet seem scary to him. Without his father in the picture, Jojo turns to his imagination, filling the void with his own version of Hitler, created out of the ideals and expectations his country wants him to embody, a country he doesn’t want to let down.
And oh, how easily do those messages infiltrate his mind. He even calls his best friend his second-best friend, because, of course, the Führer comes first.
But love can still combat hate, even if that hate seems to have wrapped its ugly grasp around the entire world and dug its nails in. And there’s no one more loving than Jojo’s mother Rosie. Played as insightfully as ever by Scarlett Johansson, Rosie is a compassionate, tenacious, peace-loving woman who has witnessed how easily the war has revealed and given a voice to the vile underbelly of her country, and fears her son will become a reflection of it all.
So she does what every parent does best: show him another way to live. She responds to his ignorance with patience, his anger with joy, his hate with love. She is, without a doubt, the heart of the movie. And even though the film takes place through Jojo’s eyes, it’s her story that shapes the narrative.
“What did they do?” “What they could.”
Vividly aware of how easily good deeds can lead to death, Rosie uses every second of her time on screen reminding the audience that your situation doesn’t define you. You define you. Your actions define you, your choices define you, and only you can make those decisions.
Not to quote Captain America, but to quote Captain America: “Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right…When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — No, YOU move.”
Rosie represents the very real humans who don’t let the world rob them of their morality, who do the best they can with the position and privileges they’ve got, and who fight to keep humanity from succumbing to darkness and fear.
Because fear is a powerful weapon. And as Jojo Rabbit shows, when used by people with agendas, fear can tear the world apart.
While Waititi uses whimsical, child-like stereotypes of monsters to illustrate how outlandish a world run on fear is, it’s strong-willed and quick-witted Elsa, played by Thomasin McKenzie, the young Jewish girl living in Jojo’s house, who takes the labels slapped on her by society and uses them to her advantage as best she can.
Jojo is afraid of her, so she becomes scary. Jojo thinks she’s dangerous, so she shows him how right he is. At 15, she’s nothing to mess with. She plays the cards she’s dealt with everything she’s got, and, if Rosie is the heart of the film, Elsa is the backbone.
As the only non-caricatured character, she’s the reminder that, yo, this is serious. Yeah, we’re laughing at Nazis saying “heil hitler” every time someone enters the room, but at the end of the day, she’s not laughing. Six million Jewish people aren’t laughing. This is not a joke.
And McKenzie plays Elsa with such a heavy weight, it’s impossible to forget that while the audience might be laughing at the childish notion that “Jews smell like brussels sprouts,” very real adults have forced very real human beings into very real dark places – hiding in walls, ostracized from society, thrown into concentration camps.
Society did that. And Waititi, with his lighthearted yet heartbreakingly-revealing script, won’t let us forget it.
“Is it dangerous?” “Extremely.”
My main critique of the movie is not the movie. It’s not Waititi’s “visionistical” idea. It’s not the cast’s acting. (Definitely not that – they were all stellar.) It’s the audience.
Because you sit there in a crowd that’s laughing at Waititi’s jokes, and not just in the “funny Nazis, they’re outrageous clowns” type of way. They laugh at Waititi’s Hitler, ignoring the fact that as an imaginary character, he’s created by Jojo and therefore represents Jojo’s internal struggle. Hitler throws a fit (a very, very well-acted fit, shoutout to Waititi) and the audience laughs: “haha, there’s Hitler acting like a baby when he doesn’t get his way.”
And maybe it’s just me, but I have no faith the audience is making correlations to the real world. They’re laughing because Hitler is funny. They’re laughing because he’s yelling and screaming and kicking a chair.
But that’s a ten year old kid’s mind. He’s wrestling with what he feels is right and what his entire country wants him to be. He’s learning to stand up against hate. He’s learning to rewrite everything he’s been taught.
And it’s uncomfortable to sit surrounded by people who will laugh at someone standing against society.
Which, I guess, is Waititi’s goal. He wants to make us unsettled enough to leave the theatre, head back into the real world, and use that unease to take a hard look at how we’re living now.
But I just don’t trust the audience is actually seeing that far into his Hitler antics. And maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s part of what Waititi wants. But I can’t shake the sense that a vast majority of people will watch this film and think, “what a funny movie about WWII” and not once take it as a warning to examine the world around us.
Now, that’s not to say the other jokes don’t land well. There are plenty of intentional comedic moments relying on physical characters that do well to illustrate just how messed up Nazi Germany and those who supported it were. Waititi does a masterful job with this script, and especially so at keeping everything within the line of Jojo’s young naiveity.
We see what he sees. We see more, too, but it’s not in focus. Blurred out war maps on tables, adults talking in the background about things that he isn’t concerned with, they all set the scene and foreshadow the next bits of the plot. Waititi gives us hints of what’s to come, while also remaining perfectly within the realms of Jojo’s childish bubble. If it doesn’t matter to him, we don’t spend time on it.
It’s really well done.
The script is painful, and funny, and powerful, and heartbreaking. You’ll laugh, but you’ll also cry. You’ll feel for the lives stolen from every Jewish person that McKenzie carries onscreen as Elsa. You’ll feel for the citizens stuck risking their lives to remain human while their country fights against them. You’ll even feel for the people who aren’t necessarily good, who haven’t been strong enough to stand up against oppression, but who show there’s still a tiny slimmer of morality hidden within.
There is no savior in this movie. But there is hope. And there is love. And sometimes, as Jojo Rabbit shows us well, those are what keep humanity alive.
Jojo Rabbit is in theaters now.