Jojo Rabbit

In What We Do in the Shadows (2014), Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), and parts of Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Taika Waititi disabused me of a notion I too often have: that unbridled happiness in comedy is going extinct. (In a very different context, this was true of Little Women, too.) To examine that kind of lightning in a bottle too closely is to risk getting burned; the closest I can get to grounding myself is to suggest that he has a postmodern sensibility but not the self-consciousness. It’s a wave he rides, not a note he plays.

Waititi’s new film, Jojo Rabbit, made me happy but it was, well … bridled. Based on a novel by Christine Leunens, the elevator pitch is roughly: Huck Finn meets Anne Frank. When Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) finds out that his mother (Scarlett Johannson) is hiding Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), a Jewish girl, from the Nazis, it frazzles the 10-year-old’s loyalties. Nazism is all he knows: his imaginary friend takes the form of the fuhrer (Waititi), who represents the tug of conformity on the boy’s divided conscience.

The movie itself is a little split. In a nutshell, it’s The Death of Stalin for kids. Like that film—and The Little Hours—Jojo Rabbit puts contemporary words into historical figures’ mouths, which means Waititi has to actively suppress the horrors of the Third Reich and, thus, jumble adults’ sense of historical irony while making the stakes unintelligible for children.

Johannson is the highest-profile victim of this. She looks right, and she moves right, with the slink of a flapper whose best days were in Weimar. In what amounts to disciplining her son in drag, Rosie smears soot on her cheek like cork, and her physical chicanery is pure cabaret. (Rosie is a war wife impersonating Jojo’s absent father.) But how can anyone believe in a manic pixie dream frau who traipses about a totalitarian state calling her son “Shitler”? Spoilers ahead, but, though it is likely that this totalitarian state was, especially on the cusp of defeat, equal parts vicious and inept, it seems less plausible that it would execute Rosie but leave her son to live unsupervised—whether or not it knew he was living with a refugee.

Like Nazi Germany itself, the movie crumbles in its last act, but there is a lot to loot among the ruins. A German-language version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” plays as the hero scampers through the credits like the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night. Waititi’s Hitler imago is a confidence booster at first; we see how Nazism marketed itself to Jojo’s demographic as a pop-cultural phenom, and this, plus a galumphing man-child dictator psyching the boy up for Hitler Youth sleep-away camp, is delightfully subversive. When Jojo begins to doubt his convictions, Waititi goes from being sassy to throwing tantrums that both imitate Hitler’s real-life demagoguery and perfectly embody a spoiled child. He makes a very timely and incisive point.

That point flips when it comes to the “actual” adults, who phone in their fascism as the Allies close in. As the heil-happy S.S. officer who knocks on Jojo’s door, Stephen Merchant looks like stick bug in undertaker black; his precarious smile reminded me of No-Face in Spirited Away. Rebel Wilson is as funny as I’ve seen her—when she cheers for teen pregnancy during the baby-brownshirt orientation, she looks as exposed as a bratwurst without the bun. Finally, Sam Rockwell’s subtle vulnerability is, as usual, the most delicately realized part of the film, and lends its themes credibility.

This credibility is hard-won. I began to doubt it when Elsa was shown to have the reflexes of the girl from The Ring, or in the oddly smug way that she leans into Jojo’s antisemitic stereotypes to feed his puppy love. Their dynamic evolves, however, and McKenzie and Davis (who is a miniature Johannson) transition from Anne and Huck to Wendy and Peter Pan.

If Tarantino distorts history for the sake of revenge, Waititi is squarely on the side of forgiveness. And, as a filmmaker, he is both liberated from the guardedness of a Wes Anderson, as well as the risk-averse sentimentality of a conventional director, who might have attacked this story from a less oblique angle. Jojo Rabbit takes for granted that Jews are human beings; what it says is that, beneath the brainwashing, Nazis are people too.