As you probably know, Jojo Rabbit is a comedy about a young boy growing up in the final months of Nazi Germany and earnestly trying to fit in with the Hitler Youth and do his bit for the war effort, encouraged by his imaginary friend, a goofy version of Hitler played by director Taika Waititi. Tom Holland, in his excellent book Dominion, points out that Hitler has replaced the Devil as the embodiment of evil for modern, post-Christian Europeans, but as well as being the embodiment of evil the Devil was always been a figure of fun, outsmarted by the heroes and heroines of folk tales and subjected to slapstick indignities in miracle plays. There’s a long and honourable tradition of treating Hitler with the same contempt, and Taika Waikiki’s ludicrous, child-like Führer is the latest in a line that stretches back via Mel Brooks to Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch.
Although goofy Hitler is naturally the big selling point in the trailers, he’s a relatively minor element of the movie, which is more about Jojo’s relationship with his mother (Scarlett Johansen), his discovery that she’s been hiding a Jewish girl, Elsa ( Thomasin McKenzie) in the attic of their house, and his dawning realisation that Nazi Germany may not be quite as glorious as he's been led to believe. The best sequences are both chilling and funny, as Jojo (beautifully played by Roman Griffin Davies) bumbles his way through a Hitler Youth training weekend. The tone in these early scenes works well; there’s a slightly hysterical note to it all, sunlight on the surface and darkness lurking just beneath. The relationship between mother and son is well done too, and there’s a nice recurring theme about imaginary friends - Jojo’s mum role-plays as his absent father, Jojo pretends to write letters to Elsa from her absent fiance, and Elsa herself is hidden away and can venture out only when no one is around, so imaginary Hitler is in good company.
Now and then there’s a throwaway gag that seems to come from a different movie, like when Jojo, arriving to volunteer at Hitler Youth HQ, is briefly offered the job of ‘walking the clones’ - we see a group of identical blond boys waiting in a corner like jackbooted Midwich Cuckoos, and suddenly, just when the movie has convinced us of the world it’s built, we’re struggling to suspend disbelief again (and all for the sake of a pretty weak one-liner). Not that the wartime Germany on screen is trying too hard to resemble the real one - the fairly irreverent approach to history is signaled from the start, when a German version of the Beatles’ I Wanna Hold Your Hand plays over the credits, and the dialogue makes no attempt to sound as if comes from the 1940s. Jojo’s mother and her house both look surprisingly immaculate after five years of total war - but I guess it’s a child’s eye view, so perhaps the chic clothes and lovely Jugendstil wallpaper are bathed in the same fuzzy glow with which Jojo views the Wehrmacht’s prospects on the Eastern Front.
The presence of Elsa in the attic, and Jojo’s gradual realisation that she isn’t a monster, is the emotional core of the story, and it’s an affecting one, although it’s interesting that the type of anti-Semitism Jojo seems to have been indoctrinated with is of a very superstitious, mediaeval variety - he, and the other Nazis in the movie, harbour lurid, half-formed ideas that Jews drink human blood, have horns and bat wings, read each others’ minds, etc. No doubt real German kids at that time did believe such things, those ancient folk hatreds forming part of the rich soil in which Nazi anti-semitism sunk its roots. The film gets some easy laughs out of them - oh, those stupid Nazis! But there are more modern forms of anti-semitism which were probably much more important in the Nazis’ rise to power - sour conspiracy theories about Jews hoarding wealth, controlling governments and the media, and having more loyalty to each other than to the nation they live in, which Jojo Rabbit never really mentions.
That’s a shame, because those notions still persist today, and not just among neo-Nazis. One of the most shocking things about UK politics in the past few years has been the way these noxious ideas have flowed from the crank left to infect the mainstream, to the point where people I once respected are happy to share weird memes about the Rothschilds and the ‘Hand of Israel’. A film about Nazi Germany that wanted to be relevant (and many of those same people think Jojo Rabbit is ever so relevant) ought to be slightly uncomfortable viewing for them, but no, they can happily chuckle along with its depiction of anti-semitism as a kind of neo-mediaeval phobia which affects only the uneducated and the wicked.
As the film goes on, the tone wobbles seriously. Something happens to Jojo’s mother - the revelation is cleverly done and very shocking - but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions - would the authorities really have arrested her and not picked up her family as well? Would Jojo be left fending for himself? In the final days of a collapsing regime, perhaps they wouldn’t, and perhaps he would, but it seemed to need a little bit more explanation than the script provides.
Later, when Jojo’s town is invaded by the allies, the film can’t really cope at all. The fall of the Third Reich is already a kind of dreadful comedy, with generals in bunkers issuing grandiose battle plans to vanished panzer divisions while old men and children were sent out to fire one-shot rocket launchers at advancing tanks. Downfall captured some of that dark absurdity, but Downfall was a deeply serious film, and Jojo Rabbit can’t go there. It shows civilians being herded to defend the flimsy barricades, but there’s no weight to the images; sunny and sometimes funny, they still seemed touched with Jojo's boyish fantasies, but surely he's moved beyond those by this stage? There’s no sense that he is ever in real danger of being shot, or that Elsa might emerge from years in hiding only to be raped by the Red Army. We know things like that did happen in real life, but we know they can’t happen in Jojo Rabbit, because Jojo Rabbit is a feelgood film. It’s well-intentioned, well-acted, well-directed, and has a bunch of good jokes, but in the end its comedy just isn’t black enough to match its subject matter.
If it was, of course, nobody would want to watch it.
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