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'Heil me, man!': Jojo Rabbit balances comedy with a dark history lesson for children

Chris Knight reviews Jojo Rabbit, a satire set in the closing days of the Second World War, in which a little boy has an imaginary friend named Adolf Hitler

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You could stuff a bunker with the actors who have played Adolf Hitler over the years. Charlie Chaplin may have got the ball rolling with his portrayal of “Adenoid Hynkel” in 1940’s The Great Dictator, but there have been more than 100 others, from the sublime (Bruno Ganz in 2004’s Downfall) to the ridiculous (Uwe Boll in his 2011 comedy Blubberella).

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A surprising number of Brits have had a go, most with their natural accents, which makes for an odd disconnect. Alec Guinness did it in 1973’s The Last Ten Days, Anthony Hopkins in 1981’s The Bunker, Ian McKellan in 1989’s Countdown to War, and Robert Carlyle in 2003’s The Rise of Evil. There have also been some notable “supporting” Hitlers in such movies as 2008’s Valkyrie and 2009’s Inglourious Basterds.

But you’ve never seen the likes of Taika Waititi, the New Zealand writer/director of Maori, Irish and Russian Jewish decent who dons the moustache and brownshirt for Jojo Rabbit. It won the People’s Choice Award at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, amid a modicum of hand-wringing that was quickly overtaken by that for Joker.

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He’s Hitler, but he’s not. The film, set in the closing days of the Second World War, stars Roman Griffin Davis as Jojo, a 10-year-old growing up in Nazi Germany. Impressionable, lonely and being raised by a distracted single mother (Scarlett Johansson), Jojo has for an imaginary friend the Führer, who spouts National Socialist ideology as filtered through a pre-adolescent brain.

So on the one hand he informs Jojo that Jews are basically another species that sleeps upside down like bats. But he’s also obsessed with the perfect Heil. “Come on, Heil me, man!” he cajoles Jojo in their first scene. His anachronistic speech patterns are echoed by the film’s musical choices, which include “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand,” The Beatles’ 1964 German-language cover of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

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For his part, Jojo is more exuberant boy than Nazi-in-training, although part of what Waititi is peddling in what he’s termed an “anti-hate satire” is the notion that, with the right indoctrination, anyone can believe. “I’m massively into Swastikas,” says Jojo, summing up his crooked credo.

Of course, filmmakers engage with Nazi philosophy and iconography at their peril, and some commentators have faulted this one for being too glib, and not properly engaging with the racism he skewers. But Waititi is clearly aiming for Mel Brooksian levels of lunacy here, perfectly encapsulated in the scene in which a world-weary Hitler Youth leader (Sam Rockwell) concludes the list of summer camp activities with “… und blowing shtuff up!”

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The cast also includes Rebel Wilson as Rockwell’s aide-de-camp, and Stephen Merchant in a cameo as a Gestapo officer obsessed with Heiling everyone who enters the room. But the standout is Thomasin McKenzie (2018’s Leave No Trace). She plays Elsa, the young Jewish woman that Jojo’s mother has hidden in the walls of their apartment. The boy finds her early on, but tells neither the authorities nor his mother, anxious to study this mysterious creature himself and probe her weaknesses.

Their conversations create what are at once the film’s least hilarious and most touching scenes, as Jojo slowly comes to realize that Elsa is not the monster that Hitler has described – though again, his education is delivered at the same simple level of a child’s understanding.

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And to those who would say that giggling at Nazis has no place in today’s dark world, I would answer that extreme intolerance demands extreme varieties of reaction, from mirth to outrage. Certainly, scholarly discussions are not the place for chuckles. Nor are they needed when good people push back against racist demonstrators. But movies give us a safe space to mock what we would otherwise fight. And Jojo Rabbit is a remarkably funny tale.

Besides, it also contains two very dark moments, to remind us of the stakes, then and now. One I will not dare spoil. But the other can be quoted, and it happens when Jojo and his mother see several lifeless bodies hanging in the town square. The childish impulse is to assume that all adult actions have a logical reason, so he gestures to the dead and asks his mother: “What did they do?” She replies: “What they could.”

4.5 stars

Jojo Rabbit opens Oct. 25 in Toronto, with other cities to follow.

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