Young boy in Nazi Germany has an imaginary friend

Rating: 8/10 (9 May 2020)

While the main character of this film is ten years old, it is not a movie for children, being more in the tradition of Robert Benigni's 1997 film Life is Beautiful. The title character, Johannes "Jojo" Betzler (Roman Griffith Davis) is a member of the Hitler Youth in a small town in 1944 Germany, but he is a miserable little Nazi. He earned his nickname when he refused to kill a rabbit during a training exercise and really screws up during grenade practice, being too close when the device goes off. He survives, but his face is scarred. He doesn't have friends, except for fat little Yorki (Archie Yates), so he conjures up an imaginary friend in the form of Adolt Hitler (Waiki Waititi, who also directed and wrote the screenplay). Then he finds that his mother (Scarlett Johansson, nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) is hiding a 15 year old Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) in their house. The local members of the Hitler Youth are commanded by Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), who lost an eye during combat earlier in the war, and he is assisted by Alfie Allen and Rebel Wilson, but they are essentially caricatures rather than characters. (Wilson's character even claims to have given birth to 18 blonde Aryans like herself.) The local head of the Gestapo, played by Stephen Merchant, reminded me of one of the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Based on the novel Caging Skies by Christine Leunens, the script by Waititi won the Oscar in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. Despite the subject matter, the film's purpose is satirical and it is actually quite funny at times. While it offers no new insights into the Nazis and is not all that original (Charlie Chaplin made The Great Dictator in 1940 and Mel Brooks The Producers in 1967), it is timely because of the recent rise of Anti-Semitism.