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.
Movie Monster 