Kids, Then and Now

Roman Griffin Davis, Taika Waititi and Scarlett Johansson as child, imaginary playmate and mother in Jojo Rabbit

Early in Taika Waititi’s new film, Jojo Rabbit, the title character (Roman Griffin Davis) walks through his hometown in World War II Germany. It’s a merry gambol as he skips along, accompanied at times by his imaginary playmate, Adolf Hitler (Waititi). Later in the film he takes a very different journey. The Allies are breaking through the town’s defenses, and he darts from one hiding place to another, not just at the street level, but sometimes racing through the basements of bombed-out buildings. His first journey is taking him to a Hitler Youth summer camp where he hopes to become the ideal Hitlerjugend, defending the fatherland from the horrors of Communism and Judaism. The later journey is a return to his home, where he fears the girl he’s come to love, a young Jewish woman his mother has hidden from the Nazis, may have been hurt by the bombing. The difference between those journeys is the story of Jojo Rabbit, an audacious little film that sets out to defang Fascism by treating it as a joke.

That’s not to say the film ignores the threat posed by the Third Reich. When Jojo first discovers Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding behind a wall in his late sister’s room, he threatens to turn her in, believing his government is right in sending Jews to the camps. She blackmails him into keeping silent by pointing out that her discovery will necessarily lead to his mother’s execution for hiding her. As events unfold, that threat turns out to be very real. Later there’s a tense scene as the Gestapo searches the house looking for anything that might implicate Jojo’s mother in the Resistance.

With the exception of a few scenes, Jojo Rabbit is a child’s view of the war. The boy’s embrace of Fascism is a thing of youthful enthusiasm. It’s a game, which scenes with the imaginary Hitler make clear. The Fuhrer romps through the woods with Jojo and at one point turns up in a Native American headdress. Even as he spouts anti-Semitism there’s nothing scary about him until Jojo’s relationship with Elsa makes the boy question his youthful values. Only then does the imaginary playmate become something demonic.

This juvenile approach is a good fit for Waititi’s irreverent, improvisatory humor. This is a man who, with co-writer Jemaine Clement, created what seemed the definitive comic take on the vampire mythos in What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and then topped himself with the recent TV versions, including the funniest beheading since Monty Python dispatched Mary Queen of Scots. He also breathed new life into the Marvel cinematic universe with Thor: Ragnarok (2017), a film that managed to combine galaxy-sweeping action with a tongue-in-cheek approach. Essentially, he’s a master at having it both ways. With the Thor film, he embraced and kidded the genre simultaneously.

He does pretty much the same thing with the wartime thriller in Jojo Rabbit. He’s assembled some skilled comic actors — Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Alfie Allen — to make the Nazis look ridiculous, while also using Scarlett Johansson, in a powerful and very sympathetic performance as Jojo’s mother, Rosie, to underline the more serious issues at hand. Johansson’s Rosie is both a dedicated Resistance fighter and the ideal mother. In one of the few scenes not shot from Jojo’s point of view, she confides in Elsa that she’s horrified by her son’s embrace of Fascism, but she wants him to realize how wrong that is for himself (there’s also a practical reason for that; would you really want to trust a 10-year-old with secrets that could get you killed?). For all the tensions of her Resistance work, however, when she’s with Jojo she’s really with him. She helps get him through his youthful insecurities and often makes him feel they’re the only two people in the world. There’s a particularly charming scene in which she acts out a dance scene, playing both her husband and herself before getting Jojo to dance with her despite a limp from an injury sustained at the youth camp. She’s teaching him to survive, which proves to be a very valuable lesson as the plot develops.

The film has been criticized for not attacking Fascism vehemently enough. I can understand that. In the current political atmosphere, anything short of a full-on denunciation can seem a betrayal. But I wonder if Waititi’s comic derision isn’t a more effective tool, at least cinematically. Yes, he leaves out the more serious attacks on Judaism to focus on childish myths about Jews, but this is anti-Semitism as perceived by a child. The myths are going to have a lot more traction with him and make more sense coming out of his mouth than the faux scholarship used by the Third Reich.

The film has also been accused of showing “good people on both sides,” primarily because of Rockwell’s character, who seems more foolish than evil. I think that’s a little short-sighted. One of the key jokes about Rockwell’s character is that he’s in the closet. It’s subtle but also quite clear that there’s something between his and Allen’s characters, and the places where they’re almost caught are very funny, because they don’t sink to stereotyped effeminate humor. They’re just human. I would suggest that Rockwell’s character is an important part of the film’s moral code. The good people are gay men, Resistance members and Jews — the very people the Nazis are trying to eliminate. Jojo’s transfer of sympathies from Hitler to them is a pretty powerful journey, one you can’t help wishing would happen more in the real world.

 

High school students Eric Deulen and Alex Frost with guns in Elephant; Is this the new normal?

The second episode of The Purge’s second season takes place in the days following a Purge, the neo-Fascist government’s night of legally sanctioned murder and mayhem. It’s a little disorienting, then, to be suddenly thrown back into the Purge. Even more off kilter, the scene is done with a subjective camera in which we fight off men attacking a woman. When she tries to thank us, she realizes, we’re about to kill her, but just before we can strike the first blow, the Purge siren goes off and a title informs us that the Purge has ended and asks if we’d like to continue purging. Ben (Joel Allen), a university student who was almost killed in the last Purge, has been playing a video game. There’s a loud knocking, and he pulls back a curtain to reveal he’s in a game arcade, and another player is waiting to use the game. After a moment of hesitation, he hands the controller to a child. That may be the sickest scene I’ve ever seen on television, and I’ve watched a lot of twisted shit on TV.

There’s a similar jaw-dropping moment in Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant’s film about a school shooting. Alex (Alex Frost) and Eric (Eric Deulen) are playing hooky, watching a TV documentary about the Third Reich, when a delivery truck pulls up on the street outside. They open the door and sign for a package containing a semi-automatic they had scouted on-line in an earlier scene. It’s that easy. In Van Sant’s film it’s just another detail in the mosaic of high school life he assembles leading up to the climactic shooting.

Elephant is a demanding but mostly rewarding film. Van Sant plays with time throughout. The camera follows various students through the school and its environs on the day of the shooting and then jumps back to the day before to show Alex’s being bullied and then spending the evening with his friend Eric. At times, we see the same event from different perspectives. Nathan (Nathan Tyson), one of the school’s leading football players, walks past a trio of young women who flirt with him casually before he goes off to meet with his girlfriend, Carrie (Carrie Finklea). Later, we play the same scene from the girls’ perspective before they go to the cafeteria. At another point, Elias (Elias McConnell), an aspiring photographer, takes a picture of John (John Robinson) in the hall as a young woman runs by. That scene plays three times, from Elias’, John’s and the girl’s perspectives.

Throughout the film, Van Sant picks up snippets of conversation and stray details that capture the students’ problems. The running girl, Michelle (Kristen Hicks), has body problems. Her gym teacher disciplines her for wearing long pants to gym class. When Michelle goes to the locker room, she changes in an awkward way designed to keep the other girls from seeing her body. Nathan and Carrie quarrel about their plans for later. He wants her to find some girls to bring as dates for his friends, but she’s not too keen on letting the other young women be exploited. The lunching trio discuss boys and clothes and going to the mall. Then they all go to the women’s room to throw up what little they’ve had for lunch.

 That last detail is almost too much. It feels like a gag and seems to have wandered in from another film. That’s how subtle most of Van Sant’s filmmaking is in the picture. The cast of mostly non-actors or beginning actors (with effective performances in adult roles from professionals Timothy Bottoms and Mike Malloy) is very natural. It’s like you’re eavesdropping on their lives, and you have to work with Van Sant to assemble the pieces of what’s basically a cinematic puzzle.

That makes for a fascinating journey, but there’s a problem with that kind of construction. It can be very hard to come to any kind of conclusion. Playwrights like Daniel MacIvor and Caryl Churchill have made it work, and it certainly works in short films like Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943) and Kenneth Anger’s “Fireworks” (1948). Alejandro G. Iñarritu got away with it in 21 Grams (2003) by not revealing how his key characters were related to each other until almost the end. That’s not how Van Sant plays it in Elephant. Once he gets to the school shooting that brings the various characters together as victims or survivors, he has nowhere to go. The film doesn’t so much end as it just stops. It’s hard to tell exactly what could have worked there. You want to see the ultimate fate of the shooters, but almost anything that could happen feels too conventional. Ending with their arrest or escape would seem like something from another film.

There’s also a curious moment before the shooting when Alex gets into the shower and Eric joins him. Certainly, the idea of their going through some kind of purge before the final act of violence makes sense. But then they start kissing, because, as Alex says, “I’ve never been kissed before, have you?” As much as we may think society has grown up in the last few decades, the sight of two men kissing is still heavily loaded. Although in context it’s very sad that this is the only connection these two young men can find, it reads as gay. That would certainly fit with the suggestion that both young men are responding to bullying, but I don’t think that’s what Van Sant is after. He seems to want these two to be no different from the other students (not that being gay makes them less human, but it does suggest a different story). As a result, the scene is inconclusive, and if it doesn’t quite sink the film, it seems almost too much of a question mark to leave with the viewer.

What keeps those inconclusive moments from ruining the film is the powerful nexus of meanings Van Sant has created within the rest of the picture. When Eric confronts the school’s principal during the shooting, he berates him for not supporting him when he complained about being picked on and then adds, “Anyway, Mr. Luce, whatever. You know there’s others like us out there, too.” Through the course of the film, Van Sant has created a world where emotionally absent parents, disengaged authority figures, bullying and bulimia are the new normal, along with violence and the ready availability of firearms. That sense of normality is really the film’s most terrifying element.