"Jojo Rabbit" — a Film About Nazism I Liked Far More Than Expected

I appear to have jinxed myself: Taika Waititi has made a film I like a great deal, and it's about Nazism.

"Jojo Rabbit" is one of those cases where a genuinely striking form fuses properly to what it's carrying. On the surface it's an ordinary coming-of-age story under conditions of total control and submission. Through the first half I couldn't shake the thought that Waititi had set out to write a manual on building a workable ideology — he plays Hitler himself, after all, appearing not as the terrifying ruler of the planet but as the imaginary friend and helper of ten-year-old Jojo.

The Führer became a caricature a long time ago; it's only here that we can't quite accept it. After the ban on the harmless "The Death of Stalin," Russian producers' self-censorship kicked in and "Jojo" was never seriously considered for release. To this day nobody has tired of the formula in which the Germans are the enemy and the Russians liberated the world.

We worked out long ago that if somebody turned up who hated people with warts, they'd immediately start exterminating everyone with warts, nationality notwithstanding. Everyone is unique, and there's no sense burning someone for thinking differently — violence has never led anywhere good, and talking is the only thing that does. That idea runs through nearly every film worth watching now. It's entirely expected that Jojo manages to step over his own convictions to help the Jewish girl hidden in his house — but can you actually understand another person? You don't have to accept their picture of the world; you have to want to understand it.

I'm deeply imperfect myself, I carry plenty of my own stereotypes, and I try to shed some of them — there's a certain contempt for the state machine in this very text, for instance. So watch the film; it may get you thinking too. The mother, incidentally, is played by Scarlett Johansson, if that's a consideration.