JoJo Rabbit

Portraying Nazis as buffoons go back almost to the beginning of Nazis. It at least goes back to Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, which was made in 1942, when the prospect of Nazis taking over the world was a possible thing. Of course, the most notable example of this is Mel Brooks' The Producers, first released in 1968 and then adapted into a long-running Broadway musical. But this notion of turning such evil into comedy still makes people uncomfortable.

Thus the mixed reviews for Taika Waititi's Jojo Rabbit, in which a young boy has an imaginary friend--Adolph Hitler--and finds that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in her house. The film has been polarizing, but I think it succeeds, mostly.

To start with, the film is set in the waning days of the war, and we don't see hardly any of the atrocities. Sure, there are a few people hung in the square for treason, which gives the otherwise comic storyline a dose of sober realism, but we do not hear about concentration camps. Instead Aryans boast about their genetic superiority while behaving like idiots.

The central character is Jojo  (Roman Griffin Davis), a ten-year old boy who is also a Hitler youth. His father is away fighting, and his mother (Scarlett Johansson) is a quirky woman who openly wishes the Germans would lose so the war would end. At the beginning of the film Davis attends a kind of camp to learn how to be a soldier. This is run by Sam Rockwell, who has been cashiered out of the army because he lost an eye. He is assisted by Rebel Wilson, who has a passion for burning books.

This camp sequence is pure comedy, especially when Davis' imaginary Hitler (played by Waititi himself) appears. Because he is the figment of a ten-year old boy's imagination, he is a childish simpleton. While these scenes are nervy, I think they work, much in the way Brooks made Nazis look stupid with the performance of Kenneth Mars in The Producers. As we know, racists tend to have lower IQs.

Davis discovers that a Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) is hiding in his house. She was a friend of Davis' older sister, who died. She tells him he can't turn her in, or it would get his mother in trouble. They form an uneasy truce, that of course blooms into friendship. Davis wants to write a book about how to spot a Jew, and she fills him with fantastical notions such as that Jews sleep hanging from the ceiling like bats, sporting tails, and can read minds.

These scenes are the least successful of the film, because McKenzie is the lone representative of Jews in the story, and thus has to represent the obvious fact that Jews are just like everyone else. I do give McKenzie credit for a performance that elevates her character above the page.

What works better are the scenes of how the Germans faced the end of the war. Rockwell, in another tricky performance, shows the ambivalence of a Nazi who realizes he's licked. He is not an evil guy, and some critics have bemoaned that a film has presented a "nice" Nazi, but jeez, I imagine some Nazis were nice, just in the wrong place and the wrong time. There are plenty of bad Nazis in the film, such as Stephen Merchant as a very tall gestapo.

Jojo Rabbit has many funny moments, mostly in a deadpan comedic style. When Davis snatches a hand grenade and nearly blows himself with up with it, Rockwell calmly tells his other campers, "Don't do that." And Waititi is a hoot as an impetuous, goofy Hitler. The sight of him tucked into a small boy's bed can't help but be funny.

Brooks thought that the best way to defeat Nazis were to lampoon them, which Waititi has carried on. I'm not sure that's the best way, as Woody Allen said in Manhattan, "Well, a satirical piece in the Times is one thing, but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point. Physical force is always better with Nazis. It’s hard to satirize a guy with shiny boots."