“What did they do?” asks the boy in the Hitler Youth uniform, gaping at the corpses of “traitors” strung up by the Nazis, dangling in the town square.
“The best they could,” his mother mutters.
JoJo Rabbit is a film that plays with fire in something of the same way. When the first trailers came out, I was filled with a sense of dread: The director, New Zealand comic genius Taika Waititi, made a string of truly delightful films prior to this one, including the uproarious Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and the mega-popular Marvel franchise film, Thor: Ragnarok (2017).
Now he clearly was treading into dreaded Holocaust Humor territory, depicting Hitler himself and wrapping a tale of Nazi horror in jokes: Roberto Benigni won an Oscar attempting this in 1997 with Life Is Beautiful, but his career has never recovered from the bad-taste backlash. The genre is mostly a junkyard of embarrassing discards in the mold of Hogan’s Heroes, with the occasional The Producers hiding in the pile. Possibly the only actor who ever really successfully mocked Hitler on film was Charles Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1939), but that film was released before his real monstrousness was laid bare.
What Waititi has achieved instead is a brilliant balance of hilarious, biting satire and heartbreaking tragedy, revolving around the abovementioned little Hitler Youth member, 10-year-old nebbish Johannes “JoJo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), who gets mocked by his fellow little Nazis when he can’t bring himself to snap the neck of a rabbit he’s handed by his youth group’s one-eyed trainer, Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell).
More than that, JoJo Rabbit contains a key, brilliant insight into the nature of fascism, and authoritarianism generally: Namely, that the blind, black-and-white dualistic fanaticism that fascism demands is a worldview best suited for 10-year-old boys—mostly the kinds of personalities found in Lord of the Flies—and the adults swept up in it are at best emotionally stunted, if not horribly twisted monsters. Everyone else is ground up in the machines they build for themselves.
Waititi doesn’t hammer his audience with this point, but works it subtly into everything that proceeds onscreen. We are given a front-row view of JoJo’s hilarious interior world: The “imaginary friend” he invents for himself is none other than Hitler himself, played by the director, offering life advice and urging him onward into fascist fanaticism. To compensate for his humiliation with the bunny, JoJo grabs and tosses a hand grenade during an exercise, but it blows up and leaves him scarred.
His mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson, in an Oscar-worthy performance) nurses him back to health and keeps an eye on him, while Captain Klenzendorff finds ways for him to stay busy in the Hitler Youth unit. But then he discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl (Leave No Trace’s Thomasin McKenzie) in the attic, and well, everything changes.
Though it is a satirical comedy, JoJo Rabbit is definitely not a feel-good holiday film. But in a year when white-nationalist fanaticism is bidding to return to the international stage, it might be the just the movie we need to help make sense of it all, if that’s even possible.