Happy ending for Hitler Youth, as Nazis get their comeuppance, doesn't sit right

Rating: 4/10 (7 February 2020)

Writer/Director Taika Waititi is not the first filmmaker to use farce to satirize the Third Reich. In 1940, Charlie Chaplin attempted to mock the Nazis in his first full sound film, The Great Dictator. After the war, Chaplin was quoted as saying that had he known about Hitler's program of genocide, he would never have made The Great Dictator.

Chaplin implicitly recognized later on, that turning Hitler into a buffoon was not the proper strategy to expose the Nazis for what they were. It was a cheap strategy in which viewers reveled in the Nazis' comeuppance ex post facto (the buffoon being the perfect straw man-easily punctured like a papier-mâché piñata). The sad reality is, of course, that aside from their ultimate defeat, the Nazis were successful in bringing misery to a vast number of their victims.

Here Waititi employs the same strategy in having Hitler (played by Waititi himself) become the imaginary playmate of his protagonist, ten year old Johannes "Jojo" Beltzer (Roman Griffin Davis), an aspiring member of the Hitler Youth. There's nothing wrong with the concept of having a ten year old German boy in the waning days of World War II, having Hitler as an imaginary friend. But wouldn't it have been a much darker (and perhaps a much more accurate portrait) to have Hitler be more manipulative and seductive?

So when Jojo refuses to kill the rabbit while ensconced at the Hitler Youth camp, Hitler pretends to sympathize with Jojo as he does in the film. But later (as an alternate scenario), through his persuasive powers, he convinces the boy to change his mind, and make it seem like, "yes, it's okay to go ahead and kill the rabbit." That would be much more in line with the way many of these kids turned out under the spell of a Svengali like Hitler.

But as is the case with many European post-war filmmakers (and especially German ones), there always has to be at least one "good German," to balance out the horror of the Nazi characters (if you're German, the plaintive cry that "not all of us were and are bad" must be ubiquitous). It's a noble sentiment but sometimes leads to the wrong impression that Nazi perfidy wasn't as widespread or perhaps there was ALWAYS a significant counterbalance of good Germans, who were ever present to "do the right thing" (i.e. opposing the genocidal madness of fanatical adherents of the Nazi regime).

So not only does Waititi promote Jojo as one of his good Germans who turned out to be good (and not one of those fanatical Hitler Youth who fought in the streets of Berlin to the very end), but there's also the one-eyed Wehrmacht Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), another buffoon of a character, who ends up sticking up for the Jews, thwarting the Gestapo and saving Jojo from certain execution by the Russians, after they emerge triumphant against the Nazis.

And Waititi insists on introducing some more "good Germans" (this time much closer to home) in the form of Jojo's mom, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson ), who has been hiding a Jewish teenager, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) in a secret room throughout the war. It's all part of Waititi's strategy to promote a pyrrhic victory-the good guys facilitate their comeuppance against the bumbling Nazis.

Elsa, in particular, turns out to be a virtual super girl-convincing Jojo of the error of his belief in the "Master Race" and outwitting the Gestapo in the crucial "dark moment" at the end of the second act. There are no truly fleshed out characters in Jojo Rabbit-only those designed to protect the audience from grasping the true nature of Nazism and reducing them to ordinary, clownish villains in Waititi's generic "anti-hate" campaign.

On the other hand, when Waititi eschews turning his Nazis into perennial clowns, he's more successful (and makes one feel he's getting at "something"). There are "glimpses" throughout Jojo Rabbit of the darker side. I'm thinking of scenes such as when Jojo's fellow Hitler Youth kill the rabbit, or when we see Jojo's drawings of the repulsive caricatures of Jews in his notebook or the aftermath of the murder of Rosie, hung in the streets after being outed as a collaborator with the resistance.

Waititi's most revolutionary gesture is the politically incorrect way in which he depicts the anti-Semitism of ordinary Germans. Even the goodly Jojo is infected by the scourge of "Jew hatred." While we never see any fanatic Nazis talking about extermination, the banality of such ordinary "shop talk" is indicative of the kind of racism inculcated in the minds of those who indulged in what Hannah Arendt termed "the banality of evil."

In the end, however, Waititi serves up a predictable happy ending, again promoting the comeuppance of a group who in reality were the victors in the game of genocidal madness (in reality did Hitler get his just desserts?-not really...he killed himself in the bunker but was responsible for murdering millions).

For those kids who went to their death as committed Nazis, the rest of the remnants of the Hitler Youth (like Jojo) who underwent de-Nazification, did not emerge "dancing in the streets" upon liberation (in contrast to the happy Jojo and Elsa). Indeed, it took these kids years to overcome the horrific conditioning imposed upon them by legions of brutal taskmasters-hardly a group of certified buffoons.