I was in two minds whether to see ‘Jojo Rabbit’. I know I’m in a minority but I have not been impressed by director Taika Waititi’s previous films and the trailer didn’t do much to entice me. However, it had received a lot of lavish praise and it appears to be a serious contender in awards season, so I decided it needed to be seen. A 10 year old boy, Jojo, in a town in Germany in 1944 is a keen new member of the Hitler youth. His Mother, Rosie, seems not to approve of his Nazi ideas, and, unbeknown to her son is hiding a young Jewish girl, Elsa, in the hollow walls of their house. When Jojo discovers Elsa, they start to forge a tentative friendship. In fact, she may become a better friend that his current best one, an imaginary Adolf Hitler.
Whilst I am all for ridiculing and satirising the Nazis, it needs to be done with a lot more bite than this movie does. There are a couple of decent gags, especially the German Shepherds one, Stephen Merchant provides a marvellous cameo as a Gestapo officer and Tomasin McKenzie is excellent as Elsa. She brings a real depth and humanity to a pretty stereotypical part, and she is in stark contrast to the caricatures that populate the rest of the film. The Germans soldiers we meet are bumbling idiots, no more threatening than the same were in ‘Allo Allo’, and thus trivialising their heinous crimes.
Rosie is a very poorly drawn character and Scarlett Johansson seems lost trying to portray her. There is one particularly excruciating scene that she dominates that reminded me of a famous Tommy Cooper sketch! It seems inevitable that Rosie is, in fact, working against the Nazis, as almost every German we meet are at worst foolish, or just decent folks who don’t really believe any of the party propaganda. This nonsensical view becomes more annoying as the film progresses and the toothless satire gives way to mawkish sentimentality that left me totally cold. It also, unwittingly, propagates the myth, that the people were not behind Hitler, thus lessening their complicity in his atrocities.
Never quite descending to the horror of the execrable ‘Life is Beautiful’, this nevertheless leaves an unpleasant taste.
Rating: 4 out of 10