JoJo Rabbit, 2019
The latest film from Taika Waititi, JoJo Rabbit follows a boy named JoJo who is bright-eyed, gentle, optimistic, enthusiastic, and, oh yeah, an aspiring Nazi. JoJo is influenced by various adults, including his anti-Nazi mother (Scarlett Johannson), an imaginary Adolf Hitler (Waititi), and a dashing-if-exasperated commander (Sam Rockwell). When JoJo is unexpectedly thrown into a relationship with a hiding Jewish girl, he finds himself questioning his previously uncritical adoration of the Third Reich.
From a filmmaking point of view I absolutely adored this film. The performances are all solid, the color scheme and design elements are incredibly inviting and lively, the writing is both crisp and irreverent. Waititi's sense of the absurd is on full display, and the film manages to be both incredibly fanciful and heartbreakingly sobering at the same time. In terms of emotions, it's probably closest to Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Because of the cartoonish trappings, when real violence does intrude into the narrative it's doubly shocking.
What I'm still mulling over in my mind is the portrayal of Nazis in general in the film and the softening of the atrocities of the war. I definitely understand the concept that the film is highly subjective to JoJo's point of view, so it makes a certain degree of sense that he is shielded from the realities. A huge amount of irony is mined from this chipper, compassionate boy espousing racism and hate-speech without fully understanding the implications of what he's saying or of the actions of those he reveres.
At the same time, I have mixed feelings about just how full the film is of "nice Nazis". We witness only one act of cruelty--the killing of a rabbit--and aside from that every Nazi character is portrayed as buffoonish, silly, ignorant, or some combination of those three. Despite one jarring element (which is a major spoiler, so I will not get specific), I felt that the film did not do enough to connect the dots between the actions of the people in the film and the vague threat that hangs over JoJo's Jewish acquaintance. Even the jokes about the outlandishness of anti-Jewish propaganda (they have tails! they hang upside down like bats!) never seems to acknowledge that these beliefs led to real tangible harm of real people. There has been a surge of white nationalism and Antisemitism in the last few years, and while I don't think that Waititi would ever intend to feed into that nonsense, I do think that this is yet another imagining of WW2 where most Nazi soldiers (and even higher ranking officials) just got swept up in a bit of madness, didn't really know what they were doing, etc. There's even a line where someone says that "Hitler was doing bad things we didn't know about", as if the atrocities of WW2 were just a little side project that Hitler pulled off on his own.
I didn't want my viewing to be influenced, so I didn't read any reviews or think-pieces about the film before watching. I'll now be checking some out, because I'm interested in what others thought about the things I liked and some of my hesitations.