A film of two halves....

Rating: 5/10 (8 January 2020)

In 1940 The Little Tramp was a Jewish barber living under the shadow of Nazism and his alter ego, Charlie Chaplin was Adolf Hitler, or rather Adenoid Hynkel, "The Great Dictator" since, even in a Chaplin comedy in 1940, poking actual fun at 'Hitler' himself might have seemed out of the question. A couple of years later, while the War was still ongoing. Ernst Lubitsch made "To Be or Not to Be". another very funny about the Nazis that even included the line, 'So they call me Concentration Camp Ehrhardt', and in 1968 Mel Brooks had the temerity to stage a bad-taste musical called 'Springtime for Hitler' in his film "The Producers" with a spaced-out hippy called L.S.D as Hitler. The film was pronounced the funniest film ever made by Peter Sellers and roundly condemned by the British critic Dilys Powell who found the whole idea repulsive.
The point is that Hollywood has always seen fit to take something as monstrous as Nazism and make fun of it. Actual Holocaust jokes they have stayed clear of though the Italian Roberto Benigni had no such qualms when he made "Life is Beautiful". Hollywood applauded him with a number of Oscars. Now it's the turn of the New Zealand born writer, director and actor Taika Waititi who has combined the Mel Brooks approach with the Benigni approach in his movie "JoJo Rabbit" with very mixed results.
In these supposedly more politically enlightened times the argument has run, is it right to joke about Hitler and the Nazis and most of "JoJo Rabbit's" critics have tended to come from the moral Right and to give Mr Waititi his dues he has pushed the boat out here. The hero is a ten year old member of the Hitler Youth whose imaginary friend is none other than the Fuhrer himself and he's played by Waititi much in the style of Dick Shawn's L.S.D. Indeed, the first thiry minutes or so are very funny if, like me, you enjoy bad taste and have a Brooksian sense of humour and then it all goes disasterously wrong. Waititi gets serious with a major sub-plot involving a young Jewish girl hiding in the attic, (a kind of Anne Frank minus the family), and our youthful hero undergoes a change of heart from Nazi sympathiser to love-struck puppy while there are long, glum patches with not a laugh in sight but much squirming in the seat. It does pick up a little towards the end with the reintroduction of some more bad tasted gags and scenes that resemble a kind of comic version of "Germany Year Zero" but by then I had basically given up the ghost.
On the plus side it is very well acted. When he's not required to be serious young Roman Griffin Davis is fine as JoJo though it's Archie Yates as his friend Yorki who comes close to stealing the movie. Scarlett Johansson is also superb as JoJo's mother, a German sympathiser to the Jewish cause while Sam Rockwell and Stephen Merchant are both brilliant as 'comic' Nazis, one basically a nice guy and the other just the kind of Nazi we all love to hate and Rebel Wilson is splendidly over-the-top as a Nazi who is basically just a baby-making machine. As the girl in the attic, Thomasin McKenzie is basically wasted.
So a film of two halves, the better half being the tasteless one when the villains are reduced to ludicrous caricatures. When he puts on his serious face, however, Waititi just ends up by being scantimonious.