Oscar Best Picture Nominee Reviews: Part 1 Jojo Rabbit

Spoiler Free.

2019 was a great year for cinema. In my very humble opinion as a teenage film fanatic, I’d say this was the best year of the decade. Well, I only started watching films seriously in the latter half of the decade so all I can say is that this statement holds true for the past 5 years. 

To commemorate this fantastic film season, I created an Oscar prediction table with some of my cinephile friends, Nicole, Anne, and Jubilee. It’s a competition to see who’s the savviest at predicting the Oscar winners and boy are we competitive. Here’s the link to the table if you’re interested; merely make a copy and then fill it out. If you want to join the pool to win a fake Oscar trophy, give me $10 and email me a pdf of your answers. 

Oscar Prediction Table 

However, I wanted to do even more. With the Oscars being less than 3 weeks away, I was struck with the idea of watching and reviewing as many of the nominees for Best Picture as I could. The first one I will review is Jojo Rabbit. Interestingly, Jojo Rabbit wasn’t the first movie I watched that was nominated for Best Picture, that honor goes to Little Women which I had the pleasure of seeing in theaters. However that movie nor other Best Picture candidate movies such as Parasite or Joker was the inspiration for these reviews even though there’s plenty of material out there stating that all 3 were better-crafted movies than Jojo.

What’s so special about Jojo Rabbit that prompted my lazy self to produce something meaningful?

To answer that question I first have to talk about my very first impression of the film. And it was a quirky impression in a negative manner, to put it lightly. I mean how could I have a different impression when it was circled around that Jojo was about a boy with an imaginary friend that was none other than Adolf Hitler? The fact that the director, Taika Waititi, had also directed Thor: Ragnarok, one of my favorite marvel movies, didn’t alleviate the alarm bells that were ringing in my head. I thought that this time, he’d finally gone mad and pushed past his comedic limits. I thought if there was a spectrum for WW2 movies, Schindler’s List would be on one end and Jojo Rabbit on the other, and I couldn’t see how that could be a positive takeaway. 

That’s why, for weeks, I put Jojo on the bottom of the to-watch list. It’s tragic to me how even after all the first impressions that were shattered by movies I eventually watched, I still succumbed to this very basic human fallacy. 

Thank goodness I decided to watch all the trailers of the Best Picture Nominees one day just scrolling through YouTube. Jojo Rabbit’s actually had me both laughing and intrigued. That same day, even with a pile of homework and school the next day, I couldn’t help my curiosity and watched Jojo Rabbit. 

It was incredible. I don’t remember the last time I laughed and cried in the same movie. The cast, especially the core young ones, are electrifying when they have scenes together. Roman Davis as Jojo Betzler is lovable at first sight. Thomasin McKenzie as Elsa Korr, the Jewish girl Jojo finds out his mother is hiding in the attic, is the agent of change in Jojo and key to the success of the entire film. Archie Yates as Yorki is perhaps the funniest character in a movie full of them. I wish he had more scenes than the ones he ended up filling. In these three characters, Director Waititi is able to filter the Nazi regime through the lenses of children, a narrative that’s been missing on the big screen. 

Then, the majority of the adult cast rounded out a delicately done comedic take on Nazis. Scarlett Johansson has been one of my favorite actors for a while now and she first impressed in Marriage Story and now in Jojo Rabbit as the amazing mother to Jojo. She is one of the movie’s strongest forces in challenging the Nazi worldview Jojo has fantasized himself in. Amidst the political divide she has with her son, she’s still able to maintain a loving relationship and teach Jojo about finding little pockets of happiness in a time of war. Finally, I couldn’t ignore the most glaring character in the film, Waititi’s portrayal of imaginary friend Adolf Hitler. The goofy and childish mannerisms that this Hitler adopts stands as a vast contrast with the real life Hitler which goes to show how differently children growing up under the Nazi regime thought about their leader. 

I realized after watching the film that by making the subject of Hitler almost taboo in our society, we’ve done ourselves a huge disservice. As we are well aware in 1984, censorship of a word or idea will only lead us to forget our thoughts on the subject manner as well. In the case of Hitler, we simply can’t afford to forget. We can’t forget that no matter how much he’s reviled today, he was loved my most in Germany, especially the youth who are always easily indoctrinated as seen in every instance in history. 

Jojo also allows us to peer at the true nuances of human goodness at the time. Not all Nazis were evil. It’s interesting how we gloss over the evilness of our founding fathers’ history of slave ownership yet are ready to condemn Nazis completely and wholly for a similar sin. I can already sense the backlash coming from my comparison of our founding fathers to Nazis; keep in mind that I’m not all of a sudden condemning our founding fathers or exonerating Nazis. I’m only here to be a vehicle for some people to reexamine some concrete viewpoints. I’m asking them to think a bit harder for how we view history for the possibility that we may think harder about our current polarized climate. 

Additional Reviews for Further Reading

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/movies/jojo-rabbit-review.html

https://www.npr.org/2019/10/17/770262214/jojo-rabbit-your-reich-is-calling

https://variety.com/2019/film/news/the-love-it-or-hate-it-trick-of-jojo-rabbit-column-1203399911/