Looking California and Feeling Minnesota Podcast: Episode 6 - Jojo Rabbit

In the new episode of Looking California and Feeling Minnesota, Barry and I have an in-depth and fun discussion about the Academy Award nominated movie Jojo Rabbit.

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LOOKING CALIFORNIA AND FEELING MINNESOTA

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Formula Still Works: Jojo Rabbit is an Average Film That Would Never Get 6 Oscar Noms if it Wasn't About the Holocaust

NAZI COMEDY JOJO RABBIT SNAGS SIX ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATIONS USING HOLLYWOOD’S TRIED AND TRUE FORMULA

Long after it’s become a cliché of its own, exploiting the Holocaust for easy nominations is still a thing – and Jojo Rabbit is prime evidence.

Jojo Rabbit, directed by Taika Waititi, is a comedy-drama about Jojo, a young German boy in the Hitler Youth whose imaginary friend is a whimsical Adolph Hitler. Jojo, the titular character, comes to question his Nazi beliefs when he discovers a secret his beloved mother is hiding.

Jojo Rabbit is a mild misfire of a movie that never quite threads the delicate needle of comedy and drama that its bold premise requires. It isn’t an awful movie, but it isn’t a great one either, as is reflected in its 80% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes and the fact that it has only brought in $32 million at the box office.

With the film’s subdued critical and financial results you would think it had no chance for Oscar nominations…you’d be wrong. Jojo Rabbit has reeled in six Oscar nominations including Best Picture. So how did the mediocre Jojo Rabbit become such Oscar bait? Easy…it used the super cynical Oscar formula.

The super cynical Oscar formula goes like this…if you want to guarantee an Oscar nomination then your movie must be about one of four broad topics…here they are in hierarchical order…

1. Holocaust/Nazis

2. Slavery/Civil Rights/Race

3. AIDS epidemic/LGBTQ themes

4. Hollywood

Since 2009 when the Best Picture category expanded from 5 nominees up to 10, only once has the Best Picture category been devoid of at least one film that hits upon these subjects. Some notable beneficiaries of the formula over the last decade are such mediocrities as BlacKkKlansman(2018), Call Me By Your Name(2017), Hidden Figures(2016), Selma(2014), Dallas Buyers Club(2013), The Help(2011), The Kids Are Alright(2010), as well as Best Picture winners Green Book(2018), Moonlight(2016) and The Artist(2011).

Even the best directors in the business have used the super cynical Oscar formula to advance their career. Steven Spielberg spent two decades making blockbusters that got him no Oscar love, but after a failed attempt to use the formula for Oscar gold on The Color Purple (1985), he finally took home the Best Director and Best Picture prize with Schindler’s List (1993).

Quentin Tarantino’s last four films, Inglourious Basterds(2009), Django Unchained(2012), The Hateful Eight(2015) and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood(2019), have all utilized the formula, and three of them got Best Picture nominations for their efforts. Tarantino has yet to win the coveted Best Director or Best Picture Oscar, but maybe he’ll be victorious this year with his homage to Hollywood.

The question is…why does the super cynical Oscar formula work?

Well, in terms of Holocaust/Nazi and Slavery/Race movies, the answer is simple. The Manichean nature of the narrative is easy to understand…there are good guys and there are very bad guys…it is all very black and white, pardon the pun.

Another reason these subjects are cinematically employed is because the Holocaust and slavery are monuments to human depravity and suffering, and as uncomfortable as it is to admit, those two subjects are chock full of dramatic potential. The same is true of the AIDS epidemic, which was its own kind of Holocaust. The bottom line is that whatever subject has death as a constant and foreboding presence in it is going to be loaded with drama…and hence has the potential to be a good film.

They give the most hackneyed story structures a historical weightiness, elevating them into what votes believe to be classy award-winning pictures.

But the suspicion is that it’s even simpler than that.

The two cities at the heart of the film industry, Los Angeles and New York, are the cities with the largest Jewish and gay populations in the U.S., which most likely translates into a solid number of Academy members being Jewish, gay, or both.

Holocaust, slavery and gay-themed films are profound for most every audience due to their highlighting of humanity and inhumanity, but they most definitely resonate in the Jewish and gay communities, as those groups know the sting of persecution all too well.

The appeal of Hollywood themed movies at the Oscars is not quite so existentially based…simply put, Hollywood is the global center of narcissism and that results in the film industry liking stories about itself.

As for Jojo Rabbit, writer/director Taika Waititi is a very talented guy as proven by his direction of the very best Marvel movie, Thor: Ragnorak.

Waititi isn’t just a promising writer/director, he is also a gifted comedic actor, and in Jojo Rabbit he takes on the biggest challenge of all, playing Adolph Hitler as a charmingly lovable sidekick to Jojo.

While I think it was more artistic ambition than Oscar ambition that led Waititi to make a Holocaust/Nazi comedy, there is a Holocaust/Nazi comedy roadmap that leads to Oscar success. In 1999 Roberto Benigni wrote, directed and coincidentally enough, starred in, Life is Beautiful, the Italian language Holocaust movie that took home Oscars for Best Actor and Best Foreign Language Film.

If Jojo Rabbit was a noble attempt to make a profound and insightful film, it failed. If it was a cynical ploy to snag Academy Award nominations, it succeeded six times over, proving once again that the Oscar formula may be super cynical, but it is also highly effective.

Let’s hope once Taika Waititi has walked the Dolby Theater red carpet once, he deploys his solidified A-lister cachet to make the kind of personal and soulful movies that brought him to worldwide attention in the first place.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

Jojo Rabbit: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT/SKIP IT. This film is funny at times and definitely worth seeing, but only at matinee prices, or until you can see it for free on Netflix.

JoJo Rabbit, written and directed by Taika Waititi, is based upon the Christine Leunens novel Caging Skies and tells the story of Jojo, a ten year old Hitler youth in Nazi Germany whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler. The film stars Roman Griffin Davis as Jojo, with supporting turns from Taika Waititi, Scarlett Johansson, Thomasin McKenzie, Sam Rockwell and Stephen Merchant.

Jojo Rabbit is an ambitious cinematic undertaking that describes itself as an “anti-hate satire”. As someone who hates the vacuous woke rhetoric of “anti-hate” and believes that hate is not only normal but a vital part of the human condition, that tag line is a turn-off. But then I discovered that the film was a dark Nazi comedy, and since I have long whined about the fact that World War II movies, be they drama or documentary, always and every time make Hitler out to be the bad guy*, the film then became more intriguing to me. After being lured in by the prospect of Nazi-induced laughs, I pulled the trigger and went to see Jojo Rabbit. Thankfully, the film lives up to its premise and remedies the past anti-Hitler cinematic injustices and gives audiences the wacky and zany Hitler we’ve always wanted. (*This is a joke!)

In all seriousness, making a Nazi comedy, especially in these hyper-sensitive, hot-take abundant times, is an act of artistic derring-do. Jojo Rabbit for the most part succeeds in pulling off this most difficult of feats. If I am judging the movie on pass/fail, it passes. That said, it is a good film, not a great one.

The credit and the blame for the film’s better than average and less than terrific outcome, is writer/director/supporting actor Taika Waititi. The first and only other time I’ve seen a Waititi film was when I watched Thor: Ragnorak while bleary-eyed on a cross country flight. I hadn’t ventured out to the theatre to see Ragnorak out of sheer Marvel fatigue, and so, due to boredom, checked it out on my flight. To say I was blown away is an understatement. I was totally mesmerized as I watched this Marvel masterpiece that was funny, smart and insightful, play out on the tiny screen mere inches from my face on the cramped plane. Waititi brings the same level of inventiveness and ingenuity to Jojo Rabbit that animatedThor: Ragnorak.

Waititi not only wrote and directed the film but co-stars as Jojo’s imaginary friend Adolf Hitler. The film is at its best when Waititi, a charismatic performer, is on-screen. Waititi’s masterful Hitler bits crackle and had the audience at my screening, myself included, laughing out loud. The problem though is that they are too few and far between. After the first fifteen minutes or so, Waititi’s Hitler vanishes from the film for long stretches, and those stretches scuttle all of the film’s giddy and insane momentum.

In my opinion I think the film should have been more of a Harvey-esque story, with Hitler being a constant companion to Jojo rather than the star of brief interludes. I think this approach would have not only made the film more consistently funny and bizarre, but also more dramatically potent and poignant. Again, I understand that the film must’ve been limited by the source material, but source material needs to be adapted to the screen, and my suggestion should have been part of that adaptation.

As for the cast, it is as wildly uneven as the film. Roman Griffin Davis is very good as the Jojo, the committed Nazi boy with the active imagination. Davis plays everything straight and it is his commitment to truth that makes his Hitler sidekick so funny.

Sam Rockwell does his usual stellar work as Captain Klenzendorf, a down on his luck German soldier. Rockwell elevates what could have been a Sgt. Schultz level caricature into a brilliantly comedic yet painfully human portrayal. Rockwell fills each moment and movement with a dynamic intentionality that is simply brilliant.

Stephen Merchant has a small role as a member of the Gestapo and he is both funny and exceedingly unnerving. Merchant’s usual banal goofiness takes on a menacing tone as he is imbued with the dark power of Nazism.

Thomasin Mckenzie is an actress I really like, her Mickey Award®© (Breakout Performance of the Year) winning work in Leave No Trace was fantastic, but here she does the best she can with a rather pedestrian role. McKenzie’s Elsa is the dramatic counter-weight to the film’s comedy, but the character is so one-dimensional as to be cliched, and thus the film never sustains the dramatic heft it desires. The narrative shift to Elsa is ill-conceived and feels like an albotross around the film’s neck.

Scarlett Johansson does not fare so well either, as she is handed a paper thin character and does little to put any meat on the bones. Johansson’s Rosie is like a #Resistance manic pixie dream girl for the World War II set. I found her performance to be grating, aggravatingly shallow and irritatingly frivolous.

Rebel Wilson has a small role as a Nazi Fraulein that goes over like a lead(Pb) zeppelin. I have often wondered aloud “what in the world is the appeal of Rebel Wilson?” I don’t get it…I don’t get it at all..NOT…AT…ALL. Wilson is not funny…not even a little bit. Her bits in Jojo Rabbit are painfully unfunny and fall thunderously flat. Rebel Wilson is one of the great mysteries of our time and I am hoping she goes away before I have to exert any mental energy trying to figure out her appeal.

The bottom line is this regarding Jojo Rabbit…it is most definitely a flawed film, but it does pull off an amazing feat by being a crowd-pleasing Nazi comedy. Waititi’s Hitler humor and Rockwell and Merchant’s Nazi comedy are uproariously satisfying. While the film can be at times cinematically uneven and dramatically trite, at other times it is tantalizingly original and combustibly hysterical.

Jojo Rabbit is the type of film, both politically simplistic and emotionally manipulative, that may catch fire and garner Oscar buzz. I do not think it is an Oscar level film, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an enjoyable cinematic experience. I thoroughly enjoyed Jojo Rabbit despite its faults, and I think people should see it, they just shouldn’t pay $14 to see it. My recommendation is to either pay matinee prices or wait until it hits Netflix before seeing Jojo Rabbit. It isn’t a perfect film, or even a great one, but it is an interesting one, and in these artistically cowardly times, that ain’t nothing.

©2019