Jojo Rabbit review: Taika Waititi’s Nazi-era comedy is daring, tender and sharp

Keeping its path steady and its ambitions in check, it makes buffoons out of the fascists while lamenting how easily their beliefs can corrupt a nation

Dir: Taika Waititi. Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Scarlett Johansson, Taika Waititi, Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson. 12A cert, 108 mins.

No one makes a comedy about a 10-year-old Nazi and his imaginary best friend, Adolf Hitler, and lives under the delusion that they’re in for an easy ride. Jojo Rabbit is a titanic risk, equal to jetskiing blindfolded or dangling your fingers in a lion’s cage. Yet Taika Waititi’s film is tender, daring, and sharp – precisely pitched so that it keeps its path steady and its ambitions in check. It makes buffoons out of the fascists while lamenting how easily their beliefs can corrupt a nation.

Anyone hoping to pitch Jojo Rabbit as a direct retort to the insidious creep of nationalism around the world will be left sorely disappointed. Waititi first wrote his script, loosely based on Christine Leunens’ 2004 novel Caging Skies, nearly a decade ago. It took his new status as Hollywood hot property, post-2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, to finally get his film over the finishing line. If it feels timely, it’s only because history has a habit of repeating itself. Set in the last days of the Second World War, it follows Johannes “Jojo Rabbit” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), a young fanatic who labels himself as “massively into swastikas”. Desperate to prove his masculinity and be accepted by his peers, he swallows up every piece of white supremacist propaganda that’s fed to him. In an attempt to replace his father, who’s gone missing on the Italian Front, he also conjures up a make-believe Führer (Waititi) to give him daily pep talks.

Waititi, who is Jewish-Māori, avoids any whiff of direct imitation. His version of Hitler is only meant to represent how a little boy would process a dictator’s lies and promises (ie, stay loyal to me and you’ll be cool). He bounces around the screen like an impish clown, though, at times, his face will harden and his voice will drop to a growl – a reminder that his camaraderie is an illusion, easily overtaken by paroxysms of rage. Jojo is guilty of the same initially. In a remarkable debut performance, Davis navigates his character’s bratty outbursts and ensuing pangs of remorse with ease while preserving the fidgety vim of a kid who still sees this wrecked world as his playground.

Jojo Rabbit plays heavily off of Waititi’s own goofy, freewheeling humour, with generous nods to the Nazi comedies of Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Mel Brooks. But it’s deployed here as a form of humanisation – not to make the characters more sympathetic to audiences, but to illustrate how easily fascism feeds off banal human flaws. Some are indoctrinated, others merely complacent. But everyone is inevitably motivated by some form of selfishness or self-delusion. Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), who runs the local Hitler Youth camp, is interested only in the glories of war. He might scoff at the Nazi ideology, but in the end, it’s clear that makes him no less complicit.

The only characters excluded from this are Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), Jojo’s secretly anti-Nazi mother, and Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), the Jewish teen she’s helped hide in the crawlspace of her late daughter’s bedroom. They tentatively share their visions of a better life, whispered to each other during their tête-à-têtes at the dead of night. The faint sparkle in their eyes is proof they won’t give up. When Jojo finally sees this, too, we know that he has a chance to make things right. The kind of hope Waititi’s film offers is fragile, but precious – that love might be enough to carve a path to the future.