Title: Jojo Rabbit
What Year?:
2019
Classification:
Mashup/ Improbable Experiment
Rating:
Dear God WHY??!! (1/3)
In the course of my reviews and especially this feature, I have become increasingly aware of a paradox when it comes to bad/ “worst” movies: When it comes to actual trends, at a certain point, the label kind of mitigates itself. Whether it’s broad genres like ‘50s B-movies (Robot Monster) or niche categories like Stephen King movies (Sleepwalkers), if you can talk about a movie as the “worst” of something, there is an implied acknowledgement that there are many more that are not fundamentally different. And when you have dozens if not hundreds of creators chasing the same gravy train, many of the mistakes and excesses of individual films start to look excusable or at least comprehensible. My refrain is that the true worst of the worst are the ones that go their own way and get everything completely and uniquely wrong. That brings me right to the present film, a quite recent and outwardly innocuous movie that annoyed me enough to take another look. Here is Jojo Rabbit, a movie about a kid whose imaginary friend is Adolph Hitler, and that doesn’t begin to explain why I find it intolerable.
Our story begins at the tail end of World War 2, in a charming, picturesque German town that miraculously hasn’t been bombed, shelled or tanked into rubble already. Here, we meet Jojo, a 10-year-old boy training to be part of the war effort. He looks completely ineffectual, but he has a secret: His best friend is Adolph Hitler, though he knows nobody else can see the dictator. Adolph encourages him through his trials and tribulation, including his fateful refusal to kill a bunny that gets him the unwanted titular nickname. Things take a turn for the worse when he is crippled by a hand grenade, leaving him at home with his mother. In the spare time, he realizes someone else is in the house. Soon, he discovers that it’s one of the Jews he’s been raised to hate, but on the other hand, it’s an attractive teenage girl who doesn’t look diseased or starving. As the Red Army and the Americans close in, Jojo must make his choice, join his friends in the final battle or keep his new friend safe!
Jojo Rabbit
was a 2019 film written and directed by Taika Waititi, a New Zealand filmmaker
of Maori descent. The project was reportedly conceived in 2011, based loosely on
the 2008 book Caging Skies by Christine Leunens. Filming took place
mainly in the Czech Republic, including Prague and the town of Zatec. While the
setting was not specified in the film, the events correspond broadly to Erfurt,
a town temporarily occupied by US forces before being ceded to the Soviets and
the eventual state of East Germany. The film starred Roman Griffin Davis as
Jojo and Scarlet Johansson (wait, have I not reviewed Eight Legged Freaks?)
as his mother Rosie, with Waititi as Hitler. Other cast included Sam Rockwell
(see Galaxy Quest) and Rebel Wilson as the Jungvolk leaders. The movie
was commercially and critically successful, earning $90 million against a $14M
budget and an Oscar nomination. It is available in digital formats, but has not
appeared for free streaming.
For my experiences, my baseline for this movie is that I seem to be one of the very, very few Americans who knows more about the Ostfront than any theater the US was involved in. Needless to say, American films on the subject that are convincing to me are few and far between. The two films of comparative substance to come from the studio system are still Cross of Iron and Enemy At The Gates, both of which put anti-war allegory ahead of history. Other treatments (including some from Russia) have tended to be adventures and sci fi/ horror genre entries that use the front as a background more than a world to explore. The frustrating part is that even the lesser efforts can offer moments of authenticity and depth that have been missing from glossy and sentimental Hollywood offerings. When the present film came out, its overtly surrealist fantasy and mainstream backing offered the clear potential to bridge the gap. When I finally got to it, however, just a few months before the present review, was a film whose history makes Frankenstein’s Army look good.
Moving forward, what I feel the need to clarify is that getting the history “wrong” didn’t have to be a problem. This shows especially with Waititi’s role as Hitler, which could easily have devolved into the director trying to steal his own movie. Instead, we get a surprisingly nuanced performance that creates just a hint of Calvin And Hobbes ambiguity. This isn’t supposed to be the “real” Hitler, or necessarily what Jojo really believes he would be like, but there’s plenty of points where the “make believe” version says things that don’t fit what Jojo knows or believes either. The problem is that the movie keeps departing from reality at its own expense. If this is a child’s view of the war, then the absolute devastation of Germany by its final days should “look” even more complete than it would to a neutral adult. Moreover, we should be seeing the propagandistic view of the Soviets and Slavs in general, which might appear justified if any of the characters have seen the Red Army firsthand. It should be the hard questions that force the indoctrinated youth to consider if his side is in the right, and that’s not what we see.
And that brings me to what I find to be a still bigger problem. For all the talent thrown at the movie, the story centers on the interactions of Jojo with the refugee Elsa, played by Thomasin McKenzie. In my judgment, neither actor was up to material this complex, while the story and script continually undermine them. Among other things, Elsa at face value is an ultra-Zionist as stereotyped as Jojo’s fantasies and even more ahistorical. The more likely reality is that she started out among secularized Jews whose ethnic identity was eroding long before the Nazis set out to annihilate them, which again would have been a far more intriguing angle than what we get. Then, at the core, we have a posited conflict where the story has already copped out. If Jojo was the kind of person who would hand her over to the Nazis, he would have killed the damn rabbit at the beginning. Without that doubt, we’re left with a movie that’s checking off its shopping list of ironies and tragedies before its happy ending, minus the actual fate of the East Germans.
That leaves me with the “one scene”, and I really had to go with Taiti as Hitler. In a still-early scene, Jojo is sitting in the woods after his perceived failure to kill the rabbit. Hitler appears, and makes a comically indifferent effort to comfort him. In my favorite line of the movie, he remarks on how others have insulted him, in the process giving an unsettlingly accurate account of the war: “`This guy’s a lunatic; look at that psycho, he’s gonna get us all killed…’” He then goes into a far more interesting speech praising rabbits, which kind of fits with Hitler’s genuine interest in vegetarianism and animal rights. There’s a fair account of the perilous lives of small mammals, which makes me think of the creation myth of Watership Down. (I’m thinking about it, plus I already reviewed The Plague Dogs.) It culminates in a surreal vision of a world for all animals, including “the mighty rabbit”. It’s all vaguely charming, still not outside the tendencies of Naziism… except, of course, nothing is said about how much of the human population can stay in this multi-species paradise.
In closing, the real
question that remains is, why is this the film I’ve given the lowest rating to?
I’ve used the countdown so far to cover some of the worst kaka to come out in
the last decade, yet I’ve shown enough mercy to let the likes of The Space
Between Us and The Happytime Murders get by on a 2. As usual, the
difference comes down to simple, subjective hate. By comparison, those
egregious offenses amounted to one movie that willfully stayed within mainstream
sensibilities, and another that deliberately crossed the line without knowing
where to go from there. This is a movie that is far more frustrating, not only
because it shows more objective talent but because its failures are far more difficult
to explain. I freely admit that I am all the more irritated by the fact that
this movie was praised and accepted in the same circles where their failings
were dissected to death. The one common denominator to them all is loyalty to
the Hollywood happy ending, which from a film as otherwise ambitious as this
feels like the unkindest cut of all. With that, I can call it a day.
Image credit EclairPlay.
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