This essay was originally published in NYLON on October 18, 2019
At first glance, it’s hard to imagine how a film about a young boy in the Nazi Youth could be funny, enjoyable or even welcome. At a time when actual far-right ideologies are on the rise across the globe, it’s understandable that we might choose to disengage from using Nazis as a source of easy comedy. But in his new film Jojo Rabbit, writer and director Taika Waititi works overtime to find the ideal balance between farce and contempt by pushing Nazi ideas to their most outrageous conclusion.
Jojo Rabbit follows Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) a spunky young boy conscripted in the Nazi Youth. He greatly admires Adolf Hitler and aspires to work closely with him as he moves up the ranks of the Nazi regime. Perhaps as a result of this devotion, Hitler is also his imaginary best friend, played by Waititi himself, with all the verve and manic energy he can muster.
But in another, secret corner of their house, Jojo’s mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) is harboring a Jewish girl Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) and worrying that it is too late to save Jojo from the poisonous ideas that have surrounded him for his entire life. As Jojo finds Elsa and comes to understand and care for her, he gets a real-time lesson in empathy and kindness that contradicts his entire worldview.
It’s an interesting experiment that belies a truth we don’t often acknowledge. The Third Reich was powered by complicit adults and “Good Germans” who turned a blind eye, but it was also populated by a generation of children who never had any reason to question the virulently racist bigotry they were being fed and forced to accept. The Jewish people were “a threat to Germany” because the adults they trusted said so. German children had no other experiences to contradict the lies that became their truth. The brilliance of Jojo Rabbit is that Waititi confronts this directly by giving Jojo his own experiences with a young Jewish woman, forcing him to confront what he’d been taught while still holding him accountable for how his bigotry harmed her, and how he was participating in a system that put her life in danger.
Jojo Rabbit doesn’t hit the mark on everything and Sam Rockwell’s Captain Klenzendorf is the perfect example. In easily the most enjoyable of his recent roles, Rockwell plays Klenzendorf as an absurd caricature of Nazi bureaucracy and flamboyance but remains utterly thrilling to watch. His affection for Jojo is so apparent that his sacrifice in the film’s final moments feels earned and sentimental. But do we want to feel sentimental about a captain in Hitler’s army? Even if he is forced to surrender in a brilliant battle costume of his own design? How much empathy should we be reserving for a man who had a direct hand in brainwashing children and teaching them that their compatriots were not even human? The easy answer is none. The truthful answer is that Rockwell manages to generate quite a bit of goodwill for his character by the time the film has ended. It’s unresolved emotional conflicts like these that keep Jojo Rabbit from being truly, transcendentally excellent.
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