Originally written in November 2020.
It’s been four months, I’m still not 100% certain how to feel.
Familiarity with Taika Waititi is little benefit in knowing what you’re in store for whenever he brings something new out. I remember the quiet buzz in the run-up to Jojo Rabbit’s release: plenty of bemused intrigue, some fanatic excitement, and blanket apprehension.
And my network was all young filmmakers at the time. What I missed were the pockets of indignation. Not inconsiderable numbers of people did far more than write the film off before it had even arrived: it was immoral, reprehensible, dangerous, etc., etc., etc.
Questions of Waititi’s sensitivity aside for one second, it’s worth accepting it would be unquestionably insensitive to dismiss these criticisms. There is a time and place to splay the history books open and descend into pedantics but in our typical, every day western consciousness Nazism is the closest thing we still have to a bogeyman. The limitless payload of caution and condemnation afforded to it is a legacy of a moment in history we’re hard-pressed to contend as humanity’s lowest. We have seen the gory details, we have studied the full depths of its evil, and all the while we have been reminded time and again how easily it happened. Our understanding is of a societal affliction we can all too easily take on without a hint of a scoobydoo in the moment. We are taught to be so scared of succumbing to it that anything which remotely resembles a miniscule part of it can be cause for alarm. The natural result of this is a necessary sacrifice of only the furthest reaches of the discursive freedom and sacrosanct open-mindedness on which our entire cultural ego seems to rest. It is true taboo, and there is real concern about allowing its name and its ideas to fall into too common a parody, too innocuous a quip, lest they ride that spot in quotidian parlance straight into power once again. We know what we’re like; wet paint and hot surfaces abound in our world. It’s nigh on impossible to fully trust humanity to understand the threats it poses to itself and heed its own warnings.
In a word, I understand. The very idea of a ‘knee-jerk’ owes itself to a survival reflex we all have, and Jojo Rabbit prances about jovially so far over the proverbial line, which it effectively crossed the minute the Caging Skies adaptation was born as an idea in Waititi’s head, that it pretty much dips under the horizon. The unease and displease are wholly fathomable.
..HOWEVER
This film is absolutely lethal.
I have racked and racked and struggled to find any place in my head or heart that can read this film as bad. Rather, I’m still floored by my memory of it not as a funny film (even though it often is), but as an enthusiastically and arrestingly powerful one.
General checklist: well-shot, well-cast, harmlessly chucklable when it can afford to be, searingly satirical when it needs to be, and yet a mastercraft of drama and tragedy. Script, staging and editing are all laudably harmonised in a whirlwind of measured claustrophobia and the empty space of childhood innocence.
Archie Yates is my MVP as Yorki, without whom Jojo simply wouldn’t work (‘should he ‘work’?’ — see further below). Nevertheless this story, full of stellar support work from the likes of Rockwell and Merchant, is carried by its female leads. Johanssen stewards the torch of effectively the entire film’s huge human streak with astounding (for such an unapologetically goofy character) sincerity, which one assumes can’t be matched until she passes the flame to the fatally measured wit and vulnerability of Thomasin McKenzie. Their stewardship of what is skeletally a coming of age story is faultless. And of course, Roman Griffin Davies lives that story with a beautiful earnestness.
None of what I saw was new, but the lens it was pushed through was. The thoughts were the same, the feelings were not. And they were fierce. I don’t think any film moved me more in 2020, apart from possibly, incidentally, Schindler's List.
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Here lie the 11 previous attempts to write this sentence. There are simply too many justified sources of very heavy criticism for Jojo’s handling of its subject matter to navigate unscathed, and yet at every level — even a 'heated panel discussion’ of literal ‘Holocaust Experts’ (an unenviable title I know) — it is not derided but divisive.
What I see is a bizarre but completely disarming exposée on the young male mind and heart, which is touching enough in itself. Using that to reframe the story and study of not just Nazism but also — and more often — fascism as a whole advances the conversation, not cheapens. Maybe some feel the film is blinkered or unambitious, only biting off what it can chew and leaving the denser topics — namely the holocaust — largely out of the picture. But in that case, what’s the problem? If it wouldn’t work to include something, why do so? There’s a sense of shuffling under pressure in the film’s marketing as ‘an anti-hate satire’, which it most certainly and effectively is. The question I suppose then becomes, was it necessary to satirise this hate?
Questions like these will never have an answer to satisfy the inquirer. We’re back where we started. If this film is over the aforementioned line, beyond said horizon, then one will never be able to appreciate it from where they stand. Whether you deem it to be crossing a boundary or stooping to its level, you have to move to address it. This might seem daunting, but the alternative is inertia. Times will always change, and to suggest that this film glorifies Nazism, or even merely discusses it inappropriately, is to enter the slippy-sloped realm of worrying about the children rather than talking to them. High schools around the world are already, and forever will be, loud with the mocking sound of tasteless jokes about Hitler and the holocaust. Even if this film is low, it is on their level, and it offers not an alternative but an accompaniment to the sombreness and severity with which we justly introduce that man, his actions and his sadly ongoing political legacy to new generations. I could probably be far better read on it but this is the first time I’ve seen a film actually cross the pedagogical boundary and admit the fallibility in all of us — especially when young: the ability to be made fanatical about something we nevertheless academically, or even somewhere more innate, understand to be wrong.
What remains to problematise this film for me is not questions of its right or reason to exist, or the worthiness of its messaging, but those of respect towards people and events that happened within our collective lifetime. These again are not ones I’m qualified to answer, and those who are do not agree. Nevertheless I have no doubt Jojo Rabbit means well, does well and will at the very least create more good in the world, if not less harm.
I’m on Letterboxd.
