The political and the personal

Rating: 2/10 (18 November 2019)

A real Nazi would step on the blue butterfly. At Hitler Youth camp, older boys teach the younger ones to be dispassionate towards killing. By the time these youngsters are done with this program of systemic brainwashing, the newly-minted soldier will have no harder time shooting a man in the head than twisting a rabbit's neck. A ten-year-old boy, that's all Jojo(Roman Griffin Davis) is, caught up in the wrong place and time on this spinning green planet, but Berlin circa 1945 happen to be his fate, making him ten in dog years. His relative innocence is barbed, however, since the boy, despite lacking the killer instinct to fatally injure small forest creatures, the little Nazi desperately wants to be a credit to the German race. He wants to be like everybody else. Because of this guilt, Adolph Hitler(Taika Waititi) repeatedly appears as his imaginary friend, rooting Jojo on to be evil. It's not a matter of Jojo objecting to party ideology; he believes that an Aryan has absolute power over the animal kingdom. His inherent goodness embarrasses him; he places the rabbit on the ground and shoos him. The Fuhrer of Jojo's own making has filmic DNA traceable to the camp counselor Bill Murray plays in Ivan Reitman's "Meatballs". Waititi, in fact, seems to be channeling Tripper in the next scene, when Jojo returns to his group with the same anarchic spirit, running encouragingly alongside the Rudy-like(Chris Makepeace) kid, as if throwing a live grenade was an event in the Olympiad. Jojo's shame derives, not from some moral failure of the fatherland, but rather, what he sees as his own personal failure in regard to treating the murder of lesser lives, both human and animal, as a good soldier's mandate without tears. The kid is a zealot; he has Nazimania. Jojo lives with the enemy; Rosie(Scarlett Johannsen), his own mother, the real hero of "Jojo Rabbit". Unbeknownst to Jojo, the mother is anti-fascist and an unequivocal Jewish sympathizer. It's a man's world, even if the boy is not yet a man. Despite being older than him, Jojo is master of the house. Rosie knows, with some certainty, that her ten-year-old son would hand Elsa(Thomasin McKenzie), the Jewish girl she hides behind a hollowed-out wall, over to the gestapo for not being blonde with blue eyes. Jojo, unapologetically, is an anti-Semite; a jarring political position, to be sure, for a comedy. The boy plays mind games with his mother, greedily eating Rosie's two bread slices that she had planned on saving for Elsa. Jojo knows her mother's secret. It's a discreet interrogation with the goal of entrapping his mother for her role in harboring a known enemy; a treasonous act punishable by death. Because of Jojo's tender age, labeling him as the hero seems only natural, but "Jojo Rabbit" is not that simple. Rosie loves her son, but he is a stranger in her own house. Ultimately, Jojo pays the price for buying into party-line propaganda about Germans being human civilization's master race. The butterfly leads Jojo to a pair of dangling legs. The shoes belong to his mother. "Jojo Rabbit", directed by Taika Waititi, doesn't seem aware, just like its complicated protagonist, how Rosie ended up in a public square, swinging at the gallows. Does the filmmaker actually believe that Jojo deserves recognition as being one of the heroes, the David Bowie song's namesake that accompanies the scene in which Elsa realizes the American soldiers have liberated her?
This boy is not a hero.
Let's rewind.
Dagger in hand, Jojo finally works up the nerve to kill, or rather, go through the motions, because cold-blooded murder is not really in his DNA, which continues to be a constant source of humiliation. For the fuhrer, the schutzstaffel, and most of all, his mother, he stabs Elsa near the shoulder. The Jewish girl stops the knife's forward momentum, but not before it breaks skin, enough to draw blood and leave a miniscule splotch on her blouse. Elsa probably knows why German authorities had stopped by unannounced to sweep the house for contraband humans, yet the illegal girl, despite being maimed, willingly plays the scapegoat, as an act of magnanimity. Impersonating Jojo's deceased sister. Elsa got the birthdate wrong on Inge's identification papers when Captain Klezendorf(Sam Rockwell) quizzes her. If not for the captain's fondness for this ten-year-old loyalist, Elsa would have been outed immediately, placed under arrest, and processed for deportation, on the next train to Auschwitz. Rosie's fate is sealed, the audience realizes, in retrospect, when Klezendorf asks Jojo if his mother "spends much time at home". This pint-sized Nazi, the audience needs to remember, since "Jojo Rabbit" can, at times, be confused for Wes Anderson's "Moonrise Kingdom", that the kid is a real patriot who bought hook, line, and sinker, every fiction about the inferiority of the Jewish race as objective fact. Chillingly, Rosie never broaches the subject of his party's amorality with Jojo because she knows that mentors such as Captain Klezendorf had turned her son into an automaton, a robot, so to speak. Case and point, the boy catches his mother distributing leaflets which read: "Free Germany!" under the guise of a robot, while out collecting scrap metal for the war effort. Replace the robot costume with a soldier's uniform, and suddenly, it's easier to gauge the ideological war at home as a trenchant one. Does Jojo know about ethnic cleansing? Most likely. The boy doesn't interject as Elsa, who wrongly equates her loss with his, explains that she, too, has been orphaned. Jojo, plain and simple, talks too much. Too many times to too many people, Jojo asks about the proper course of action should he spot a dislocated Jew; a hypothetical so thinly-veiled, even Yorki(Archie Yates), a conscripted soldier his own age, understands intuitively that somebody of non-Aryan descent lives under his roof. Did Yorki, a young ideologue like his best friend, put together: "I have a girlfriend now," with "I captured a Jew," and report this to Captain Klezendorf, corroborating what he already knew from Jojo's own unwitting testimony. There is, after all, no love lost between the captain and Rosie, who knees him in the crotch and slaps him across the cheek with a black glove, right in front of his bureaucratic subordinates, after she learns that Jojo nearly blew himself up with a grenade under Klezendorf's command. Played as comedy, the audience laughs, but the debased captain, it should be noted, would have been a soldier in the Waffen-SS if not for his handicap; a defective left eye. More likely than not, Klezendorf reported Jojo's mother to the gestapo, as revenge for his public humiliation, and lest we forget, because he's a Nazi.
The titular character in Cate Shortland's "Lore", a 2012 historical drama about the outset of postwar Germany, just like Jojo, has to unlearn everything she was taught as a Hitler Youth. Hannalore Dressler(Saskia Rosendahl), the oldest daughter of a high-ranking Nazi officer, during her long trek, accompanied by four younger siblings to Omi's house, accepts, begrudgingly, the help of Thomas(Kai Malima), a concentration camp survivor, and sees for herself, slowly over their shared experiences as provisional allies, that Jewish people don't smell like "brussel sprouts" and have horns concealed under their hair. Omi tells her: "You must never feel ashamed of them. Your parents did nothing wrong." Ironically, these are the words that Jojo has to wrestle with; he was indeed ashamed of Rosie for being unpatriotic, and his father, too; a war deserter. Over time, the boy will realize that he, albeit unintentionally, informed on his own mother. Rosie died because she was living with a party loyalist. The boy could not separate the political from the personal. Jojo's shame, the longer he gets to know Elsa, will grow exponentially, and finally, one day, he'll realize with perfect lucidity that his mother was the real patriot, and did nothing wrong. His mom; his beautiful mom, who tried to teach him that real Germans sing and dance, fall in and out of love; not kill, was right.
For the time being, Jojo isn't quite there yet. "Jojo Rabbit" doesn't seem to understand that Elsa suffers from Stockholm Syndrome. Jojo used this Jewish girl as research for a book-in-progress about the origins of her people. Elsa is leaving Berlin with the boy who stabbed her.
"Lore" ends with the holocaust, a metaphoric one. Hannalore's mother, the wife of a war criminal, kept a porcelain menagerie on her dresser as a young girl. A doe at repose, Mutti's favorite that the oldest daughter carried with her from home; she saves for last, crushing this memento of her family's Nazi-affiliated past with the heel of a "store-bought" shoe. She scatters the porcelain animal body parts on her mother's dresser, mirroring the black and white photos of the concentration camps.
As a young girl, an officer's daughter, Hannalore would have snapped that rabbit's neck without any hesitation. She would have been one of the girls snickering at Jojo's reluctance to kill the rabbit
Jojo was a mama's boy.
This horrified him.
After the song is over, and the dancing stops, that's when the real horror begins.
Lore had bad parents, whereas Jojo's mother was Jojo Lioness, but the cub couldn't see the urban sprawl of the German forest for the trees.