In the dark: Leader movie reviews

'Jojo Rabbit' castigates fascism by exposing its immaturity

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“Jojo Rabbit” is one of the most gravity-defying hybrids of dark comedy and earnest pathos I’ve seen since Mel Brooks was in his prime.

Writer-director Taika Waititi adapted Christine Leunens’ satirical 2004 novel “Caging Skies,” but the result feels like the 1984 Henry Thomas and Dabney Coleman film “Cloak & Dagger,” cross-pollinated with Spire Comics’ 1973 “Hansi, the Girl Who Loved the Swastika.”

Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is a 10-year-old Hitler Youth living with his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) in Germany, near enough to the end of of World War II that even the German people are starting to suspect that the Nazis’ days of glory are done, and while he isn’t entirely friendless, Jojo’s best friend is an imaginary version of Adolf Hitler (played by Waititi himself).

Waititi threads the needle between the deadpan humor of seeing Nazis engaged in what they considered entirely mundane day-to-day activities, from book-burning to Jew-hunting, and the profound horror wrought by those deeds they committed so casually and thoughtlessly, through the blinkered perspective of Jojo himself.

Jojo is a kid who, like so many, copes with a confusing adult world by retreating into his own head, and by grabbing hold of anything in the outside world that affords him a sense of security and belonging.

Jojo can’t get a straight answer from the grown-ups around him about the whereabouts of his absent dad, so he imagines an absurdly supportive version of Hitler to fill in as his father figure.

Likewise, even though the older Hitler Youths are cruel bullies toward him, Jojo still sees the Nazi Party as a fun club, with cool uniforms and a thrilling narrative of adventure and patriotism.

It’s to the credit of Davis, as a child actor, that he makes us believe what his mother insists, which is that Jojo isn’t actually a Nazi, but a lonely little boy whose head has been filled with garbage.

It’s when Jojo discovers that his mother has been hiding a teenage Jewish girl named Elsa Korr (Thomasin McKenzie) in their upstairs walls, that he’s forced to reconsider the load of antisemitic codswallop he’d only been too eager to swallow before.

This self-questioning triggers the start of a gradual turn toward the sinister in his imaginary friend version of Der Führer, who goes by degrees from being a ridiculously optimistic and encouraging life coach for Jojo, to displaying the bellowing malevolence of the real-life Hitler.

There are literally countless ways in which this film could have gone catastrophically wrong, and yet, its balance of laugh-out-loud absurdity and gut-punching empathy are as disciplined and deftly executed as Waititi’s acting and character arc as the imaginary Hitler.

At first, Jojo’s Hitler behaves like a broad parody of how insecure little kids perceive confident grown-ups to be, but as Jojo finds himself recognizing Elsa’s essential humanity, his Hitler shows signs of childishly spiteful jealousy, until by the end, Jojo imagines Hitler raging openly, but covered in war wounds, his anger at his former friend Jojo sounding like the howls of a dying animal.

Everyone’s performances are on point here. Johansson goes for subtlety in conveying the mixed emotions of a mother who loves the innocent child her son used to be, even as she fears the monster he’s becoming, while the talented McKenzie makes Elsa every bit as formidable and engaging as her role in 2018’s “Leave No Trace.”

Stephen Merchant completely steals his scene as Hermann Deertz, an ever-smiling Gestapo agent whose impeccably good manners and unfailingly good cheer only serve to make him all the more chilling, while Sam Rockwell continues his streak of dipsticks with hearts of gold as Captain Klenzendorf, a profoundly incompetent officer whom Jojo meets through his Hitler Youth camp.

With his grandiose designs for new military uniforms, Klenzendorf is every bit the little boy who romanticizes the supposed adventures of war as Jojo himself, but he quietly demonstrates his decency to Jojo (and Elsa) twice over, the final time in a Sydney Carton from “A Tale of Two Cities” moment.

In “Cloak & Dagger,” Dabney Coleman plays Jack Flack, an imaginary crack commando and super-spy befitting the final decade of the Cold War, but even though he isn’t real, he finally dies for real when Henry Thomas, the boy who imagines him, is horrified by the real-life death toll of their make-believe “game,” and he tearfully shouts, “I don’t want to play anymore!”

“Jojo Rabbit” opens with Jojo donning his Hitler Youth uniform and telling himself that, today, he becomes a man, but it ends with Jojo actually becoming a man by putting the needs of others ahead of his own wants, and by recognizing how stupid and childish his former idol was.

“1917” depicted the horrors of warfare in grisly detail, but “Jojo Rabbit” earns its anti-war stripes by dismissing those who would bask in the alleged glories of war as scared, selfish little boys, desperate to be taken seriously as grown-ups.

While this film’s unrepentant anachronisms produce no shortage of chuckles, since most of the actors aren’t even trying to deliver their lines in anything like authentic German accents, perhaps the most moving intentional anachronism is the German-language version of David Bowie’s 1977 “Heroes” underscoring the final scene, telling us, “Wir sind dann Helden, für einen tag (We can be heroes, just for one day).”