1. I’ve been having a hard time trying to write about this film lately. From the outset, it was a pretty straightforward moviegoing experience; I saw it a few weeks ago in a packed theater on a cold Friday night, and walked back to my dorm from the theater afterwards. I wanted to get my thoughts down, but something kept gnawing away at me. It’s not that I had unanswered questions — the film does a pretty good job of tying off its knots, even if its main character often struggles to literally tie knots. It’s not that I disliked the movie — if I dislike a movie to the point where I care about my perception of its badness, I’d just rant about it to a friend instead and never speak of it again. The problem has been, is, and will continue to be that I lack the ability to describe the feeling of being so strongly affected by a film that it impairs your ability to function. As soon as the credits finished rolling and the lights went up I stood up, left the theater, put on some oldies and walked around Amherst in the dark thinking of absolutely nothing.
2. Something I’ve always found a little frustrating about a lot of modern media is that the protagonists have to be the smartest person in the room for the sake of the audience. Because the protagonist sees what the audience sees, it becomes natural that the protagonist understands what the audience understands. In contrast, what Jojo Rabbit nails so silently is how its protagonist of a 10-and-a-half-year old boy — Jojo — sees the world as, well, a 10-year old boy. He thinks, but really knows very little; he sees, but he often fails to understand. Its deuteragonist, a stowaway teenage girl named Elsa, is caught up in her own battle of trying to become a woman in a world that would rather see her dead than reach adulthood. Stories like theirs help break down the walls of plot that separate the audience and the world of the film by allowing the former to see emotions rather than plot threads. Much like real life, it’s hard to say that Jojo Rabbit has a plot; the world around them happens, and they do their best to fight back.
3. On our way to the theater to see the movie — my parents’ first time seeing it, my second — my mom asked me who my favorite actors were, something she does every few months or so. I always say Saiorse Ronan first. I think Felicity Jones came up this time, and Harvey Keitel snuck in; I’ve always had a soft spot for him after seeing him play the Wolf in Pulp Fiction. What I held back was the 3 functioning neurons in my brain screaming “THOMASIN MACKENZIE!”, because I wanted her to experience her performance without pre-conceptions. I can’t imagine what I wouldn’t give to see it again for the first time.
As someone whose memory of film stretches from pressing my face across the projector screen to watch Jurassic Park to buying tickets online and drinking ungodly amounts of slushy, I’ve never seen a performance as dominant as Thomasin Mackenzie’s in Jojo Rabbit. The only way I can describe it in a way that does it justice is that the soul of the film flat-out changes. As a lighthearted war comedy, Jojo Rabbit is worth enjoying; whenever Thomasin steps on screen, it gains an emotional edge that makes it worth remembering.
4. There’s a fascinating phenomenon in drama/comedies that I’ve started referring to as “the cliff” — the line that a film crosses where the the audience is no longer emotionally equipped to laugh at a joke the film makes. The moment where Rebel Wilson straps a grenade to a child’s back and yips “Go give that soldier a hug!” should’ve been one of the best jokes in the movie, a dark jab that would make the Cohen brothers proud; instead, most of my theater gasped in horror. Whether it’s appropriate for a film to keep wisecracking after passing the cliff is a debate worth having, but I believe that it’s undeniably respectable for movies to stick to their roots even when the subject matter has turned sour before the audience’s eyes.
5. I saw something online recently discussing how Scarlett Johansson has had such an incredible career for someone who’s only 35, which sent me way down the rabbit hole of figuring out the portfolio of someone who I’ve only known as a Marvel actor for the better part of a decade. A BAFTA at 18 for Lost in Translation? Really? I digress — as a rather uneducated filmgoer who knew literally none of this information, it was a breath of fresh air to see her fill in as one of Jojo Rabbit’s most quietly significant characters. Her struggles as Rosie simultaneously juggles being a mother of a Nazi fanatic and being the safe harbor of a scared Jewish girl hang heavy over every character and every part of the film, and makes sure it stays grounded in reality even as its events gradually grow more ludicrous.
6. Michael Giacchino, who’s perhaps most renowned for scoring pretty much every Disney movie you can think of after 2007, pulls no punches in a fantastic score. Rather than playing around with multiple themes as he’s done in previous work like Rogue One, Giacchino instead focuses on one theme while instead tinkering with instruments and tempo to associate different emotions with one consistent melody. It almost feels like he’s challenged himself — can we establish effective cues within this arbitrary condition? For a strategy that should come out as grating and repetitive, the result has an oddly beautiful air to it.
7. One of the things I appreciate most about Taika Waititi’s writing is that it makes sure to keep the audience mindful of the flaws in the heroes it presents. Jojo’s protagonism is marred by his blind faith in the Nazi cause; Elsa’s perceived wisdom is offset by appropriately juvenile emotional outbursts. “Your mother was a good person — an actual good person,” says Sam Rockwell’s Captain K before being dragged away by American soldiers, but even Rosie snaps at Jojo’s constant questioning of her intentions and the whereabouts of Jojo’s absent father. More than anything, it’s these flaws that allow us to see the characters as people rather than mere plot devices.
8. Waititi’s strategy of delegitimizing horrors through humor isn’t entirely novel, but its presence in modern cinema has been sorely missing in recent years. In a political climate as turbulent as ours right now, films like Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin and Jojo Rabbit play an important role in helping audiences remember that yes, politics really are as absurd as you think they are — and there’s no harm finding the humor in it every now and then.
9. The last time a movie affected me like this, it was La La Land. I’d gone to see a midnight showing at a near-empty theater while my sister and her boyfriend went to First Night, and when I came out it the whole place felt like a ghost town. There was no excitement or disappointment; instead, I wandered the halls alternating between trying to unpack what I’d just seen and simply thinking of nothing at all. I feel like there’s something to be said about films that make you think & feel without pulling too hard in either direction, but pulling just hard enough to matter. Some films make you think so hard your brain starts twisting itself in knots to accommodate it; some films try too hard to make you feel and ruin themselves in the process. Striking that kind of balance is hard, and I have no issue with tooting Taika Waititi’s horn to express my admiration for it.
10. I spent most of my second viewing turning over what I thought my mother, a strongly liberal feminist, would think of all of the absurdity and madness packed into a movie like Jojo Rabbit. (She was sitting behind me, so I couldn’t exactly do a NFL RedZone live viewing of it.) When we came out, she was visibly emotional. “Nobody taught me how to be a woman,” she said. “The mother [in the film] couldn’t see her own daughter grow up, so she had to watch Elsa…” She trailed off after that.
There are precious few stories from modern cinema that I’ve related to as much as my mother did with Elsa’s. But I find it extremely vital to appreciate it when others can truly, deeply connect with a movie.
10 and a half. I saw “Heroes” coming from a mile away at the ending sequence, but it still emotionally ruined me all the same. Sometimes, you can give people exactly what they’re expecting and still get the effect you want.
“Jojo Betzler. Age: 10 and a half. Today… just do what you can.”
