Pretending to be about something it fails to grasp

Rating: 3/10 (7 February 2020)

I like Taika Waititi's films, but this is an infantilzation of the holocaust on par with (trigger warning) Life is Beautiful. Like this other film, Jojo Rabbit turns the antisemitism and nazi fanaticism into a light Hollywood fairy tale with enough carefully manicured dark moments to imply that it has something deeper going on, when it really doesn't. The characters are cardboard cutouts, the story is tonally all over the place (missing is the effortless tension of comedy and tragedy present in Hunt for the Wilderpeople), and there are no insights here (we know nazis are bad, antisemitism is irrational). Jojo's transformation as presented here is facile and unbelievable, and the deliberate caricatures are too far removed from their real, historical counterparts to have any sting of the best of mercilessly dark satire.
The movie could have mined the abject absurdity of nazi ideology for humor (The Great Dictator being a classic example along with The Producers), but it's jokes are easy and soft on the audience. They don't match the subject matter and the tension between their cuteness and the movie's darker aspirations never produces anything worthwhile - it doesn't really work for the most part. This is ultimately a kids movie, a stylized fairy tale, and though no one watches this expecting Come and See (1985), its sugary tone is overwhelming and is undone by its more serious pretensions. The movie ultimately cannot communicate, let alone grasp, the weight of the tragedy it chooses as its subject matter, which makes its humor empty rather than resonant.