Any film that begins with I Want To Hold Your Hand by the Beatles and ends with Heroes by Bowie, is well ahead of the game and JOJO RABBIT is so far ahead in the comedy stakes this year you’d need a hare with its arse on fire to catch it.
JOJO RABBIT is one of those rare bits of cinema that melds high and low comedy with satire and pathos.
It’s a remarkable achievement even for such a remarkable film maker as Taika Waititi, whose canon includes Boy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, What We Do In The Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok.
Ten year old Johannes Betzler gets the name of Jojo Rabbit when he refuses to succumb to bullying peers to coldbloodedly dispatch a bunny. This instruction to kill is a virulent ripple running through his contemporaries in Hitler Youth, a boy scout and girl guide brigade bent on brainwashing German kids to blind, abysmal obedience to the Fatherland and the Fuhrer.
For Jojo, Hitler is his hero and imagines him as his personal playmate and mentor. He has regular conversations with this hare-brained apparition, a fractured father figure or buffoon big brother who dispenses nasty indoctrinating advice, a callow and cartoonish characterisation by Taika Waititi.
The Hitler Youth Camp is run by Captain Klenzendorf, an officer invalided from combat who runs the outfit with a combination disaffected disengaged perfunctory and world worn, war torn insouciance.
“Who am I and why am I here talking to a bunch of little titty-grabbers instead of leading my men towards glorious death? Great question. I’ve asked it myself every day since Operation Screw-Up, where I lost a perfectly good eye in a totally preventable enemy attack.” Klenzendorf confesses as he prances around the park, giving dual meaning to camp commandant.
Sam Rockwell’s performance is both comically outrageous and truly, tragically, heroically human. There’s a beautifully blended bond with his more than right-hand-man, Freddie Finkel—who is 100% devoted to Germany, but even more so to Klenzendorf due to the unspoken relationship between them and is brilliantly played by Alfie Allen, while Rebel Wilson plays the fearsomely funny Fraulein Rahm, the deadpan book burning adjutant.
Roman Griffin Davis as Jojo brings the inner conflict of the Heil Hitler heir apparent with inherent goodness and the schoolboy crush he harbours for Elsa, the young Jewish girl his mother has been secretly harbouring in the attic.
Rounding out Jojo’s insular world and playing the role of his lovable best friend Yorki is Archie Yates, who wholeheartedly embraces his character’s distinct view of the world around him. Yorki is a corker!
As Elsa, last survivor of her family given succour by Jojo’s mum, Thomasin McKenzie is exquisite. Her introduction in the film is pitched perfectly, seen from Jo Jo point of view, a monstrous supernatural and parasitic presence.
And, as Jojo’s mum, Rosie, Scarlett Johannson simply shines as the unabashedly imaginative, poetic and romantic woman simultaneously the very grounding force for her son. She’s fighting for the Resistance and is
trying to balance her need to live boldly and be true to herself while doing all she can to keep Jojo safe through loss and peril.
Stephen Merchant, like some SS stork, plays perhaps the most hilariously dark and frightening character of all in JOJO RABBIT, Captain Herman Deertz of the local Gestapo, who meticulously investigates reports of hidden Jews and dissenting burghers, a looming figure of doom, sinisterly threatening while totally within the farcical tone of the film, a sort of Strangelove, satirising the swastika allegiant without sanitising.
JOJO RABBIT’s antecedents in poking antic fun at the Nazi’s range from Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator, Ernst Lubitsch in To Be Or Not To Be, later remade by Mel Brooks, and the long running television stalag-com, Hogan’s Heroes, Waititi succeeds in honouring those classics and elevating his film to that mantle.
A continuous flow of top quality gags makes this a treat from go to whoa.