JOJO RABBIT (Taika Waititi, Czech Republic/New Zealand/USA, 2019)

Although JOJO RABBIT (Taika Waititi, Czech Republic/New Zealand/USA, 2019) is, at first sight, a coming-of age-movie set in the final days of the Third Reich, the opening of the film already makes it clear that the story is not limited to that particular historical moment or place. The opening sequence mixes historical footage of nazi rallies with the Beatles song "I wanna hold your hand", thus overlaying the images of  the images extatic young girls in nazi attire with reminiscences of images of hysterically screaming Beatles fans. Moreover, although English is the language spoken in this film, the written and printed texts are all in German, as if the movie wants to make clear that the props and settings are situated in a historical place and time, but that the movie addresses itself to a much wider and not place and time bound audience. And if this is not enough, the attitudes, behaviors and wise cracks of Nazi officers at the Hitler Jugend camp would not be misplaced in an American youth camp but probably very much out of order in a real Hitler Jugend camp. Nazi Germany, that's what apparently these stylistic elements are to convey, is nothing but a more or less accidental set piece for a more general, if not universal truth this film attempts to convey. JOJO RABBIT chooses Hitler's Germany because its extreme conditions provide a suitable background for the parable the movie wants to tell.JOJO RABBIT may look like a film about Nazi Germany, but it really isn't. 

That things may be different from how they appear to you  is basically the lesson that the film's main character Johannes AKA Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), a ten year old Hitler Jugend enthusiast, learns during the dying days of the Third Reich. In the first scene one sees Jojo preparing for his inauguration as a member of the Hitler Jugend (HJ) by rehearsing the answers to the questions of his entree exam and the obligatory 'Heil Hitler' salute. The adult man in Nazi uniform of whom only the torso fits is captured by the frame who puts the questions, compliments Jojo for his right answers and corrects his 'Heil Hitler' salutes, turns out to be no one less than Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi) himself, although it becomes immediately clear that - again - this is not a Hitler who actually exists in the film's story world but just an imaginary friend of the little boy who is invisible for the other characters in the film.

And here again the film hints towards realities that extend  beyond the historical place and time of the movie's story and draws a parellel with the contemporary world. Indeed, Jojo's imaginary friend Adolf Hitler who gives him advice, praise, encouragements and guidance functions as a substitute for his absent father whom Jojo believes to be fighting for Germany in Italy against the allied forces. Social scientists have argued that in contemporary post-patriarchal societies the authority of the father has diminished (they have become 'papa's', as Milan Kundera once wrote) and that in the absence of a strong father figure with whom they can not only identify but against whom they can also oppose themselves in order to develop their own identities young men (and women) become susceptible for authoritarian leaders of the populist type, even - or maybe precisely because - they tell lies and actually incite them to act against their own interests. 

That is exactly what Hitler does to Jojo. When Jojo gets scolded as a coward on the HJ camp because he is not capable of killing a rabbit and flees into the woods, Hitler stops him and tells him that 'rabbit' is a name of honour because instead of being cowardly, bunnies have to be smart, fast and skillful in order to survive in a world full of large and strong predators. Encouraged by Hitler Jojo then runs back to the camp where there is a lesson in grenade throwing going on, picks the grenade out of the hands of captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), and throws it away. Unfortunately, the grenade hits a tree, bounces back and explodes at Jojo's feet, which leaves his face marked by scars ("My face looks like a street map," as he says to his mother Rose (Scarlett Johanson)) and forces him to quit the camp and convalesce at home. And even more seriously, it is his imaginary friend who fills his head with not only an exaggerated patriotism, but also with the outrageous Nazi ideas about Jews.

And here is where another character comes into Jojo's life. Once forced to stay 'home alone' during his recovery from the grenade accident, he discovers that his mother has a shelter to the Jewish girl Elsa (Thomasin MacKenzie), who like Anne Frank hides in a room behind a wall from her German persecutors. Clever as Jojo Rabbit is, he immediately understands the predicament they both find themselves in: if he turns Elsa over to the Gestapo, she will denounce his mother as her protector and if Elsa would tell Jojo's mother that he has discovered her, Rose will see herself forced to send Elsa away. In this stalemate it is best for both parties to leave things as they are. Soon, however, Jojo sees this situation as an opportunity to use Elsa as a first-hand source of information for the book he intends to write on all things Jewish. Elsa complies, regurgitates the whole repertoire of anti-semitic myths and imagery from the Nazi-propaganda, and offers Jojo to draw a picture of the dwellings of Jews in his sketch book. When Jojo sees that she has drawn his portrait with the caption "Stummkopf", she simply remarks that that's where those Jews from the anti-semitic propaganda live: in his head that is - as she doesn't know - controlled by his imaginary friend, the xenofobic populist leader avant la lettre.

Gradually, Jojo then starts to learn that the world might be a bit different from how his imaginary friend wants him to see it. He finds out that his mother is working with his father for the resistence, and discovers her dead body hanging on the gallows on the market square of their village. When the Gestapo knock on the door to search their house and Elsa has to reveal herself, she pretends that she's Jojo's sister (in fact, Rose has taken her into her house because she was a friend of and ressembled her deceased daughter) and shows the latter's ID to prove that. As she later, as the Gestapo's and captain Klenzendorf who joined the company later, have left that she has given up a wrong date of birth to Klenzendorf's question, she and Jojo realize that Klenzendorf was not that hard boiled Nazi but instead actually saved Elsa and Jojo. And when the village is finally liberated by American and Russian troops, Jojo initially refuses to bring this news to Elsa because it would mean that she was free to go outside, realising that he cares more for her than his Nazi convictions would allow him. With respect to Jojo, then, Elsa moves from the position of foe to friend to sister to wanna-be lover to perhaps a substitute mother When they are at the verge of leaving the house into the now again free world, Jojo ties the laces of his mother's shoes that he has given to Elsa - itself a reversal of the service Rose offered to Jojo at several occasions in the film - and once outside, Elsa does what Rose had said she would do first thing when they would be free: dance. The engine of this move are not the erronous thoughts about Jews or the superiority of the Arien race, but - as his mother had predicted him - physical feelings of love ("butterflies in your belly"). Love, that is, is eventually the force that overcomes all ideological oppositons and differences

It looks as if Waititi was not content with telling this story in a straightforward way - although the film has a pretty linear and far from convoluted storyline - but also wanted to weave the movie's theme into the style and form of the film itself. The opening sequence - already confusing because of its mixture of historical footage of Nazi rallies with a Beatles song - may suggest that the film will be a sort of historical costume drama, but the very first scene that already introduces a weard kind of Hitler warns the spectator that this is not your customary WWII drama. However, once tuned for a comedy - with perhaps not the most tastful choice of subject matter - shots of corpses hanging from a gallow on the town's market square, and later the image that shows how Jojo recognizes the shoes of Rose next to his head, as she hangs dead from the gallows, delicately not shown in a full body shot) the spectator is again to be made aware that this is not your average comedy either. The film swtiches from hillarious scenes as those in the HJ camp in the beginning of the film or the endless exchanges of 'Heil Hitler' salutes in the scene where the Gestapo's and captain Klenzendorf meet in Jojo's house which reminds one of the British TV series ALLO ALLO (UK, 1982-1991), to dramatic scenes as just described, to melodrama and musical in the final scenes with Jojo and Elsa. Even dramatic scenes as the conquering of the village by American troops that have a flavor of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (Spielberg, USA, 1998) are interspersed with comical moments as when Klenzendorf and his deputy Finkel (Alfie Allen) storm the invading allied forces in the super-hero-avant-la-lettre outfits designed by Klenzenberg, perhaps thus demonstrating the rags from which fantasy figures as those that populate the Nazi ideologie are really made of. 

The film thus provides a rollercoaster experience in which the spectator is swung back and forth between Charlie Chaplin's THE GREAT DICTATOR  (USA, 1940), Ernst Lubitsch's TO BE OR NOT TO BE (USA, 1942), Volker Schlöndorff's DIE BLECHTROMMEL (BRD/France/Poland/Yugoslavia, 1979), ALLO ALLO,  SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTARDS (Germany/USA, 2009) and pick your own favorite war drama or comedy. Although these unexpected shifts and turns in mood and style may be intended to produce a sort of a Brechtian Verfremdungs-Effekt, one may wonder if Waititi has not overreached himself because instead of provoking a critical stance on the part of the spectator the film runs the risk of leaving the latter in a state of disarray, wondering not onl what this film is all about, but also what sort of film this actually is. And it does not really help that Waititi chose Nazi Germany as the backdrop for his supposedly time- and placeless - but therefore also rather shallow - universal message, because in spite of all the efforts to lift the theme above the specific historcal context of the final days of the Third Reich, that subject matter is simply too much charged with unique drama and oppressive memories from which it is impossible to abstract away. Although physical feelings like 'butterflies-in-your-belly' may eventually overcome ideological and political oppositions and differences, laughter is probably not the best means to get rid of false imaginary friends.