Jojo Rabbit (2019)
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Jojo Rabbit Movie Review
Jojo Rabbit is a 2019 World War II comedy film directed by Taika Waititi and starring Thomasin McKenzie and Roman Griffin Davis among others. It’s a very polarizing film.
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“You’re not a Nazi, Jojo.
You’re a ten-year-old kid who likes
dressing up in a funny uniform
and wants to be part of a club“
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Jojo is a lonely German boy who discovers that his single mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their attic. Aided only by his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, Jojo must confront his blind nationalism as World War II comes to an end. I’ve known about this film and its premise for a while, and I expected to get a mixed bag from it. I was right. The film’s an uneven mess.
For every great scene here, we get one that is very annoying or downright unfortunate. That uneasiness in tone and execution prevailed throughout its runtime. Overall, I’ve had a problem with this film’s basic premise, and comedic approach at portraying Nazis as incompetent buffoons. Frankly, that kind of approach can work as there have been great WWII comedies in the past (‘The Great Dictator’ remains a renowned masterpiece), but this one just doesn’t work as well.
When you set out to make a comedy out of such a serious subject matter, you’d better go full in or not attempt at all. This one fails to do that, and it was rarely all that funny to me. Some humor really was great including Jojo’s friend and Rebel Wilson who’s always hilarious, but most of the time the humor just wasn’t as strong to justify its existence with the worst offender being those imaginary Hitler scenes, which are downright annoying how incompetent, pointless and unfunny they are.
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The movie tries to include dark, dramatic elements to it, and some of those worked quite well, but still that led to an uneven tone, and a film that tried to be deep and dark as well as funny and fairy tale-like, and it simply failed in both areas, especially in the mixing of the two.
There are some standouts here. Every scene with his mother is excellent as Scarlett Johansson is wonderful, charming and so memorable in this admirable role. To me, the standout scene is the Nazis’ searching of the house, and how Elsa evaded this dangerous situation was very clever. The entire scene was so intense and so brilliant that the rest of the film suffered in comparison to it.
I also liked the tender moments between Elsa and Jojo, but at the end of the day their relationship was somewhat creepy, and the film failed to make Jojo sympathetic as a protagonist. Even worse, the movie obviously tried to tackle a very important issue of children being easily influenced by bad idols, but Nazism was unnecessary as the biggest extreme of such an example, and simply the movie failed to properly explore this theme.
So yes, Jojo Rabbit is about love against hate, it is about the incompetency and idolizing of the Nazis and how their ideologies were very silly to begin with, but in all of those themes, the film only touched the surface, and rarely explored them to the fullest degree. The end result is a very slim flick that favors style over substance.
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Where it succeeds the most is in its acting. The film features tremendous performances across the board with the standouts being revelatory Roman Griffin Davis, very strong Thomasin McKenzie, excellent Johansson and very memorable Stephen Merchant. Rebel Wilson and Sam Rockwell themselves are both very amusing.
Jojo Rabbit also plays out like a fairy tale in its bright cinematography, some very charming imagery and many beautiful moments throughout. The score, the lightweight tone and the humor all worked in tandem to create this fairy tale, childlike feel to the film that ultimately felt ill-advised in the context of the biggest atrocity that happened in recent human history.
The plot holes abound in the film too with the whole idea that his mother is a freedom fighter and her son is a Nazi sympathizer being absolutely ridiculous. Taika Waititi was also very unfortunate and frankly incredibly annoying as Hitler and he’s the only weak link in terms of the acting. His direction is also not all that great, though bold. The same goes for the humor as his previous movies, especially ‘Thor: Ragnarok’, are much funnier and much better crafted. It often bordered on Wes Anderson whom I hate. It has its standout moments for sure, but as a whole it’s too uneven. And I liked watching it, but after further thinking, it became much weaker in estimation.
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Jojo Rabbit is exactly what I expected it would be, which is a giant mess of a film. Rarely have I seen a more uneven movie that features a terrific scene followed by a very unfortunate one throughout its runtime. The performances are almost uniformly great with the standouts being Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie and Scarlett Johansson. The searching sequence and all the scenes with the mother are fantastic, but the Hitler scenes are unfunny and annoying, and the ending is chaotic. The film tries to be both funny and lightweight as well as dark and deep, but it fails at both as the darker scenes are mostly not all that well executed while the humor is only sporadically strong. At the end of the day, Jojo Rabbit is far from bad, but it remains one very ill-advised, frankly pointless and unnecessary endeavor.
