MYST POST #2: Jojo Rabbit (SPOILERS!)

Jojo Rabbit 

A Taika Waititi film

This is the story of a little German Nazi boy who, without a father, creates a sort of imaginary friend/father-figure: Adolf Hitler. Not a run-to-the-theater-immediately! logline, if you ask me. In a TheEllenShow interview with Scarlett Johansson (the Nazi boy's mother), she bluntly told the audience that "the logline is not good and [she] can't pitch it. It sounds bad" -- Ellen sympathetically agreed. Johansson asked Ellen if she'd like to try, but received an immediate "no." Then, Ellen gave it her best shot: "it's a take on a bad situation." If Nazi Germany is only a "bad situation," then the state of the US right now is nothing more than a gentle sneeze. But I digress.


I'll be honest, immediately upon hearing of this movie, I was irritated. Irritated that anyone would feel they had the domain to joke lightly about this. Irritated that there's enough people thinking there's enough distance in time from WWII to write a comedy satirizing Hitler and the Hitler Youth and Anti-Semitism. Boy, were there a lot of Jew jokes, even though I know they characterize Jojo and the Nazis and by no means are the words of the director/actors/etc.

Still, with the amount of good press it seemed to be getting, I thought I could totally scoff at the movie if I hadn't ever actually seen it. So, I watched it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not so clueless as to think this promotes Hitler or his ideas or his followers in any way. Clearly, it doesn't. Hell, at the end of the movie, imaginary-Hitler reappears in the boy's bedroom to plead the boy to give him "just a little heil" before the boy cusses him out and kicks him out of a multi-story window. It also has moments of despair that remind the audience (if we could possibly forget) how evil the Nazis were. There were also moments when I laughed (though never without a trace of guilt). Even in the most gut-wrenching scenes, though, they dealt with Nazis losing their loved ones; the only Jewish character was the girl the Nazi boy's mother was secretly hiding upstairs, and the most detail she told us about her experiences was that she ran from the train station that her parents couldn't escape from, and it wasn't a place they'd ever come back from.

In essence, I think it's is dangerous and irresponsible to try to put a comedic spin on anything to do with the Nazis. This movie did very well in the box offices and even got Oscar nominations (and awards), most likely prompting other film producers and TV writers to soon try their hand in making light of the terribly, terribly dark. I'm worried that on a global scale we'll slowly become desensitized to the evils and horrors of the Holocaust. Once we make jokes, we dull the edge that the atrocities committed should always maintain. I believe, especially less than a century after the war, that they should remain untouched by humor.

I was pretty put off by this one moment in the theater in which the Nazi Youth leaders held up a rabbit for Jojo to kill to prove that he wasn't a wimp. The minute the rabbit was held up on-screen to kill, the theater collectively "awwwww"ed. This is an example, I thought, of our slow but increasing desensitization to the true horrors of the Holocaust. Millions of people were crammed onto trains, tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and more at the hand of the Nazis. But God-forbid they kill a bunny rabbit.

That being said, let's get into the analysis.

The cinematic component that most caught my eye was the adumbration of the Nazi boy's (Jojo's) mother's shoes, which was captured by repeated close-up and medium camera shots. When she walked into their house in the evening of the day that Jojo discovered the Jewish girl living up in his sister's old bedroom, the camera cut closely to her brown and white, leather, low-heeled Oxfords. She dropped her coat and walked down the hallway, but all we could see were her shoes until Jojo surprised her and the camera cut out to a full shot.

Later in the movie, Jojo and his mother are strolling along the river on a beautiful day. Jojo walks in the street as his mother walks along the brick ledge beside him. His head is level with her shoes, and even as she speaks, we are stuck staring at the same Oxfords for the near-entirety of the conversation. Odd choice, I thought.

BUT THEN. To preface, I'll say that Jojo and his mother walk through town a lot, and often encounter Germans hanging, bloated and purple, in a line as civilians walk past and stare. They betrayed the country, I'd assume, most likely by hiding or helping Jews. Later still in the movie, Jojo walks alone through town and stops dead in his tracks. We follow his line of vision to a pair of brown and white, leather, low-heeled Oxfords hanging limply on a pair of purple, lifeless feet. There is no tilt upwards. Just a closeup shot on the shoes zooming out slightly to a medium shot at the height of Jojo's head.

I'll admit, it's a crushing moment. He runs to his mother's legs and throws his arms around them, clinging to her as he sobs in the town square. After the continual closeups to denote the shoes' significance, the viewer knows it can't be anyone else. This was one of the pivotal moments of the movie where, if you laughed away for the first half-or-so of the movie, you immediately fell silent.


In another cinematic vein, there was a neat scene in which Jojo and his mother are cycling together down the street after walking along the river. I'm convinced the cameraman somehow simultaneously wielded the camera and a moving bicycle because the camera wove in-between of Jojo and his mother in swooping patterns, capturing them from behind and then circling ahead of them.


It reminded me a lot of 1917 when Schofield and Blake are anxiously making their way through the British trenches in the beginning of the movie. The camera followed their shoulders from behind, then wove between them to capture their faces, layered one in front of the other, before again falling behind them. Everyone knows, at this point, that 1917 was shot like one continuous take, which adds to the relentless feeling of the war. In Jojo Rabbit, the continuous feeling of the shot (though I think it must have been edited) was built by the camera's gliding down the street, this time capturing the breeziness of the day and the lightheartedness of the mother-son duo that afternoon.

There was also a Wes Anderson-esque rule-of-thirds shot in that same biking montage where 2/3 of the bottom part of the frame was filled with grass and the top 1/3 was just tall enough to fit the large-wheeled bikes of Jojo and his mother as they peddled across the screen. It was a very short moment and not essential to the plot by any means, but it did make me think of Wes Anderson's colorful picture-book-like frames of perfect symmetry and I enjoyed it.

Overall, I'm going to give this movie 5/10 Oxford shoes. It was cleverly written and did show real hope at the end, despite my qualms with the plot as a whole.