Weird. Definitely Weird

Rating: 8/10 (27 October 2019)

Roman Griffin Davis is looking forward to a week at Hitler Youth Camp. When he fails to demonstrate his dedication to ethnic purity and Nazi ideals by breaking the neck of a rabbit, the rest of the campers start call young Johannes -- that's Master Davis -- "Jojo Rabbit". He runs off, naturally, and confers with his goofy imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, who informs him of the ferocity of rabbits. So Roman runs back, where Sam Rockwell is about to give all the boys a chance to throw a grenade, grabs one, and winds up scarring his face and behind. When he gets out of the hospital, his mother, Scarlett Johansson knees Rockwell in the ... well, it's not the behind.
All perfectly normal in the year 1945, as the Thousand Year Reich's ever victorious army is being shredded, with Russian, American, British, and probably Chinese armies are about to march on the town. It's when Roman discovers that his mother is hiding Thomasina McKenzie, a Jew, in the floorboards behind his dead sister's room, that things begin to get odd. She takes his knife away from him, but they eventually reach a stalemate, because if Miss Johannsson finds out he's found out, then Elsie will have to go. So instead, he begins quizzing her on her diabolical schemes to take over the world, where are the horns on her head * and so forth. It gradually begins to dawn on him that he may not have understood reality perfectly up to now, which is startling for a boy who has achieved the great age of ten and a half to realize.
It's a weird movie about children being asked to grow up too fast. The only movie that feels at all like it is THE DEATH OF STALIN, and this feels way weirder to me. After all, one of my grandfathers was a communist, but everyone agreed that Hitler was the worst person ever. It was so obvious that even the goyim had figured it out, although it took them a war to reach the startling conclusion that someone who had been screaming about Jews, Slavs, Blacks and homosexuals for more than twenty years, and who had killed, oh, all of them he could manage, might not be the nicest guy in the world. It's certainly upsetting to think of him as a goofy imaginary friend.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "here's an American Jew who grew up in the aftermath of the Second World War, when about a third of his family had been killed in the Holocaust -- which some of you deny ever happened -- so he has issues! It's not like some one vile, like Justin Trudeau, John Wayne, or Walt Disney, was a goofy imaginary friend, which is impossible, because they were evil incarnate."
Well, we all have issues, don't we? This is one weird movie. Is it a great movie? It's a weird one.

* A question I got asked in Colorado in 1971