In teaching them to kill for the Führer, they order one of the boys-Jojo-to take hold of a rabbit and snap its neck. Jojo’s Hitler Youth brigade, uniformed and organized in the lighthearted tone of a scout troop from “ Moonrise Kingdom,” is led by a trio of adults, Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), Fred Finkel (Alfie Allen), and Fräulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson), who express virulent, over-the-top mockeries and hatreds of Jews and lead the boys in a monstrous ritual of cruelty. (In his first appearance in the film, Hitler urges Jojo to “Heil” him more confidently.) Yet Jojo has decorated his room with a profusion of Nazi posters and memorabilia, and he’s often visited by his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi), who turns up in the boy’s moments of emotional need, bucking up his courage or assuaging his humiliations. Rosie, for her part, is quietly but determinedly hostile to the Nazi regime. Jojo’s father isn’t home-Rosie says that he’s away at war, but other adults tell Jojo that his father is a coward-and it’s revealed that he is suspected of being a deserter. The film is set in the last year of the Second World War, in a town in Germany where a ten-year-old boy, Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), an enthusiastic new member of the Hitler Youth, lives with his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson). Although made by the celebrated writer and director Taika Waititi and released by a major studio, “Jojo Rabbit,” with its combination of extreme goofball humor (including a campily over-the-top caricature of Hitler, played by Waititi himself) and grim and earnest portrayal of the terrors of Germany’s genocidal tyranny, plays more like a comedic fantasy composed for The Onion as a reductio ad absurdum of the blinkered follies to which Hollywood and its potentates are susceptible.
FIND THE RABBIT MOVIE MOVIE
Even though the target of satire in “Jojo Rabbit” is clearly the Nazis, the movie sharply but unintentionally satirizes itself, as well as its makers and the movie industry at large that saw fit to produce, release, and acclaim it. Whereas they turned their production of “Springtime for Hitler,” intended as pro-Nazi propaganda, into the world’s unfunniest comedy in pursuit of colossal failure, “Jojo Rabbit,” meant as an anti-Nazi spectacle, is the world’s unfunniest comedy made in pursuit of success. At last, the movie that Bialystock and Bloom, in “The Producers,” would have made when they got out of prison and went legit.