AUDACITY NOT ENOUGH TO KEEP ‘JOJO RABBIT’ HOPPING

By Dominique Paul Noth

Taika Waititi as Hitler and Roman Griffin Davis as 'JoJo Rabbit.'

Since I was born during World War II and recall the temperament of the times through a child’s eyes,  my appetite for things poking fun at  Hitler is gluttonous. But I find it has its limits. 

I deeply admire Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and wonder if there is any artist today who can poke pantomime buffoonery at Trump in similar fashion, though Trump is so much his own buffoon that may be impossible.  I regaled at “Springtime for Hitler” in Mel Brooks “The Producers,” finding the joke of a play making Hitler the hero just slapstick funny. I enjoyed the dialog satire of the original 1940  “To Be or Not to Be” and its self-centered actor (“What he did to Shakespeare we are now doing to Poland”).

But for all its good intentions, “JoJo Rabbit” found my bottom way too soon – which is surprising since it is a deeply comic satiric view of a 10 year old boy in the 1940s who makes Hitler his imaginary friend and so believes in the Hitler Youth and in Jews having tails and drinking blood that his cavorting with a slightly pot bellied and gluttonous Fuhrer – played by the writer director Taika Waititi, New Zealand’s gift to deadpan comedy  – will force both laughter and sorrow.

Particularly when the boy discovers that his Nazi-like mother is secretly harboring a Jewish teen in the wall who both scares him into 10 year old paralysis and slowly warrants his adoration.

The actors have such energy and discipline in the cavorting and commitment, and the premise is so full of irony, that the film ought to work better.  Particularly since there are sly surprises in Sam Rockwell’s portrait of the ultimate Nazi warrior while  Rebel Watson as the bovine Fraulein fanatic rises above her mugging in the “Pitch Perfect” movies.

As the Jewish girl, Thomasin McKenzie is too young at age 19 to be called a great actress, but she has the sort of hypnotic mischievous face that we admire from the silent movie days.  Scarlett Johansson is busy but standard as the mother and Roman Griffin Davis is a most dutiful JoJo in his screams of joy and pouts of change. 

Problem is, the movie goes on much longer than the joke.  Calling someone the “Jewish Jesse Owens” the first time is funny. Playing around with Heil Hitlers can become tiresome. The repetition is a sign that the movie is overplaying a slender thread, relying on high production values. 

It set itself a difficult task, trying to switch the satire to pathos and even ending with a quote about the futility of life from German poetry.  But Waititi’s invention cannot sustain itself and his attempt at three endings confirms it. My interest ran out long before the movie did.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs.. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his DomsDomain dual culture and politics outlets.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association at its inception, he also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.