According to a 2004 study by University of Oregon psychologist Marjorie Taylor and University of Washington assistant psychology professor Stephanie Carson, by the time kids hit 7 years of age, 65% of them have had an imaginary friend.
Taylor and Carson also found that having an imaginary friend allowed kids to simulate social situations in a benign context to learn, among other things, how to deal with conflict.
According to Psychology Today, having an imaginary friend can, “…also help children to cope with fears, explore ideas…” and “…to help them…with traumatic experiences.”
In Taika Waititi’s, “Jojo Rabbit”, 10 year-old Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) has the most awful imaginary friend in the entire history of imaginary friends – Adolf Hitler.
It’s the 1940s, Germany, at the tail end of WWII. Jojo lives in a nice house with his mother, Rosie (Scarlet Johansson). A loving, free spirited woman, Rosie is disturbed by her son’s worship of all things Hitler and spends the better part of the film trying to knock the Nazi out of him. Jojo had an older sister, but she died. His father is somewhere in Europe fighting for the Fatherland – though others “cruelly” tell him he is a deserter.
Joining the Hitler Youth, Jojo is excited at the chance to do his part for the glory of fuhrer and country. Trouble is, he isn’t bloodthirsty enough. Then, on his second day, he almost blows himself up.
For the first twenty minutes or so Waititi keeps things Looney Tunes zany. Though doing a good job of swiftly pulling us into its wacky world and quickly bringing us up to speed on time, place, people and possibilities, only half of the gags stick their landing. And as it zips and pops past the twenty minute mark, you begin to worry that the film will stay this way. Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case.
Jojo survives his grenade mishap but gets kicked out of the Hitler Youth. He has a souvenir, though – a red and swollen criss-cross pattern of scars that line the left side of his face. With more time on his hands, Jojo spends it hanging around the house.
One day, he hears a noise coming from upstairs. Venturing into his deceased sister’s empty room, Jojo notices a curved gouge in the flooring that corresponds to a slender gap in one of the walls. Using his trusty Hitler Youth knife, he pries open the wall like a door. Scared, though too curious to turn back now, Jojo switches his flashlight on and cautiously makes his way into the tight and darkened space behind the wall. He guides his flashlight’s small bright circle over the dark and dusty area. An unclothed baby doll comes into view. Then, taking a few tentative steps forward, Jojo angles his flashlight higher. He sees a girl. Spooked, Jojo runs for it – somehow ending up tumbling down the stairs before slamming to a stop against a wall on the ground floor.
Waititi uses imaginary friend Hitler as a manifestation of Nazi brainwashing. As we know, ten year-old Jojo and friend Yorki (Archie Yates) and German kids just like them were no match for the relentless Nazi propaganda machine – neither were Germany’s adults, for that matter.
Cleverly, Waititi appropriately mocks the silliness of anti-semitism by having most of its fearful filth come out of the mouths of children. Not only that, but he neatly makes a connection between the fertile fantasy worlds of monsters and heroes that so many young boys live in and ties it to the equally fantastical ravings of adult Nazis. By doing so, he infantilizes Hitler and Nazism and its brutal band of psychopaths. Jojo has Hitler as an imaginary friend, yes, but Waititi makes it clear that Hitler, the Nazis and its German believers have an imaginary foe – the Jew. The Nazis were children themselves, Waititi asserts, creating a completely fictitious version of Jews and Judaism and using that to propel a kind of childish adult game – brutal and sickening as it was.
As a critique of Nazism, this may not be earth shaking, but Waititi does a great job of integrating those ideas into the flow of the plot and delivering them with style and emotional heft.
The hook that most likely clinched the greenlight – Hitler as a 10 year-old’s imaginary friend – is only partly successful and, strangely, that’s okay. Waititi plays Hitler as, alternately: an encouraging, though twisted father figure; a petty dolt; a jealous wuss and a foaming at the mouth, raving lunatic (the one we know all too well). The relationship between the two is mostly played for laughs yet those laughs are few and far between. Though, as a flesh and blood dramatization of the tug-of-war going on inside Jojo’s head – between what he has been told to see, think and feel vs. what he personally sees, thinks and feels – the goofy conceit does do a good job of charting Jojo’s moral and emotional growth, while delivering a few memorably absurd moments to boot.
As Jojo’s mother, Rosie, Scarlet Johansson is a delight. She merges perfectly with the part – playing a compelling balance of tough and kind. Waititi positions her as a stark contrast to the locked up, hate-filled, shout-and-slaughter world of the Nazis. She is free and open and loving. Deeply sensual, flirty and in love with people and possibility, Rosie represents a walking, talking and, most charmingly, dancing repudiation of the Nazi’s repellent demon mixture of unrelenting doom, gloom and genocide.
In a secondary role that, at first, seems like nothing but a shallow comic riff, Sam Rockwell delivers the goods as Captain Klenzendorf. Due to a bum right eye earned in battle, Klenzendorf has been demoted from a proud soldier fighting for his country to a glorified camp counselor for the Hitler Youth. Though he is still a Nazi, his soaked in cynicism lamentations tell us that he hasn’t fully downed all of the fuhrer’s Kool-Aid – maybe half a cup?
Klenzendorf occupies a middle-ground that is immediately apparent. He’s half-there and half-not – wears the uniform but the uniform does not wear him. This could’ve taken a bit of the bite off of the back half of the film, but, due to Rockwell’s light touch and remarkable work in his final scene – he gives the part a depth and emotional punch that quietly surprises you.
The soul of the film, however, belongs to the pseudo-bro-sis tussle between Jojo and Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) – the Jewish girl who lives behind the wall. No delicate flower, the 14 year-old so-far survivor is not about to let some pint-sized faux fuhrer hand her over to his Nazi pals. She deftly boxes Jojo in by making it clear that as she goes so does he and his mother.
Jojo and Elsa’s showdown could have easily ended up blunt and preachy. Instead, Waititi keeps it alive with tension and emotion. Moments of hilarity and warmth sit side by side with brief bits of ugliness and gruesome absurdity. Davis and McKenzie make a great duo. They bark and bite at one another and then soften and soothe before spinning around to bark once again. You are drawn in and dazzled. Everything else just drops out of sight. They have you and you are glad for that.
One stunning moment between the two seemed to appear out of nowhere. Led to believe that Jews are more akin to horned beasts from another world than human beings, Jojo asks Elsa to draw where “they” live. She grabs his sketchbook and scribbles away. Finished, she hands it back to him. Jojo is confused. All he sees is a drawing of his head. “That’s where they live,” Elsa responds.
Here, with wit and flair, Waititi pushes us into Jojo’s ugly world stinking from the brain rot of irrational hate. Then, just as it seems that, incredibly, Elsa is indulging the very hate that demands her death, she knocks Jojo – and us – out with one hell of a counterpunch.
Becoming more and more engrossing as it goes along, “Jojo Rabbit” is a potent mixture of the goofy and the gruesome. It consistently lulls you into a state of light amusement only to follow it up with some devasting moment of stark realism.
Like Benigni’s 1999 triumph, “Life is Beautiful”, the light bits of comic absurdity in “Jojo Rabbit” are acts of tonal misdirection. True, the two films are very different, but in this one foundational way, they are twins. Benigni and Waititi approach and treat one of the most horrific chapters of the 20th century knowing that a genuine moment of danger and darkness hits harder if the audience is in a relaxed state of amusement.
Owing some visual debt to Wes Anderson, Waititi one ups the interior decorator/director by never forgetting that a film needs a heart that is more flesh and blood than paper mache.
