January 8, 2020
In 1998 I was ten, playing sports and Nintendo 64 everyday. The Academy's Best Picture nominees included Italy's Life is Beautiful and the eventual winner, Shakespeare in Love. These two beautifully constructed films contrasted the frontrunner, the war epic Saving Private Ryan---much more serious fare, but just as masterfully made.
No other year matches our current Best Picture race better than 1998. Many will say we've never seen films like these before. What to make of them? I give them 1998.
We have jarring tonal shifts---an abrupt, total reversal in Parasite, another foreign production attempting to clear the hurdle for the first time, and a gradual one here in Jojo Rabbit---that echo the tale of two halves in Life is Beautiful. As with that film, Jojo never truly sheds its comedic tones, which I think only bolsters its credentials. That playfulness underscores the tragedy and gives the entire running time a unified feel.
Once again, we must decide how to respond to such a treatment of the Holocaust and its immediate surroundings. The schism among Jojo's audience (and critics) is real and vitriolic.
It pays to consider the wake Life is Beautiful left behind. No less a Hitler satirist than Mel Brooks argued there are limits to such comedy. "The philosophy of the film is, people can get over anything," he told Der Spiegel. "No, you can't. You can't get over a concentration camp." Moreover, he said, none of Roberto Begnini's family perished there. The Italian could never comprehend its full nature.
Jojo director Taika Waititi is Jewish, and though their spectre looms constantly, he stays away from the camps proper. So if that is the line, I wonder what Brooks would make of getting so close to them without stepping inside. I think Waititi honors the millions fallen by focusing his satire on Nazi propaganda. Elsa's scenes remain relatively pure, albeit with surprising wit for such young characters. Those who find her passive overlook her puncturing the master-race delusion and outfoxing the Gestapo. The war itself, once it really intrudes on Jojo's homefront, is as deadly serious as it can be as seen through the eyes of any fanatical young boy making sense of his surroundings.
At ten Jojo's life hardly mirrors mine. But he's just as serious about the games and the camps laid out for him as I was. He brings that seriousness to writing his book. To me this makes the film believable.
The Nazis preyed on this desire boys have for organization, mission, obsession with calculable events, and they warped Jojo's that otherwise would have targeted the Bundesliga or movies. If Stephen Merchant had inspected my boyhood room, he'd have found mini NFL helmets and World Cup standings. What would I have been in 1940s Germany? Perhaps just a sports fiend. I hope.
Life is Beautiful was about preserving this youthful innocence, when we could with impunity be fanatical about our games. It was about defending evil from shattering it. And Begnini's much younger boy is freed to pursue his dreams. Jojo instead documents the shattering of it. A wake-up call to true adulthood foists itself on the ten-year-old, not the adulthood of joining the Wehrmacht that he desires at the opening.
And up against the grave fare of The Irishman and war epic 1917, Jojo is the divisive darling mounting the greatest case for a comedic heartstealer to win Best Picture since Shakespeare in Love. It is not something the Academy likes to allow. Yet, without a head-and-shoulders favorite, they might whip the votes. It really is 1998 again.
The whole conversation would be moot were it not for Jojo's brilliance. It pulls off a major risk and succeeds. Much is due the actors who each had to strike a delicate balance. Start with Scarlett Johansson, whose forceful, motherly personality has to be tempered with constant fear of being caught assisting Elsa.
Sam Rockwell has already displayed greatness and reaped the rewards of it. The troubled policeman for which he won Best Supporting Actor in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri isn't far from his role here. Jojo and Elsa's relationship is the heartland of the film, but his performance is the comedic capital, and this is after all a black comedy. Bitter, dismissive, sarcastic, he balances it all with warmth. For that he deserves another crack at the title.
The most difficult performance must go to Waititi as Jojo's imaginary-friend version of Hitler. No one else wanted the part. That doesn't make it the best or confirm that his every joke hits the mark. The best is Rockwell. But, rare in a satirical performance, we do get to see the true menace, just once, when Waititi turns on the powerful oratory that reminds us what brainwashed Jojo and a nation in the first place. Because of moments like this, I don't think the Nazis get the free passes that others might feel they do.
In comparison the youngsters' performances could be more straightforward, without having to balance the background of the war. For them life is just what's before their eyes. This makes Roman Griffin Davis and Thomasin McKenzie no less powerful. Archie Yates, the "kid in a fat kid's body" who "can't seem to die," is even funnier than the two leads.
On second viewing Waititi's direction truly shined for me. He uses his music much better than I'd originally thought. Remember the Beatles toiled so long in Hamburg. In several places he uses slow motion just as devilishly as Bong Joon-ho does in Parasite. By the end it doesn't just heighten the comedy, it clarifies Jojo's fear. And to get that sort of performance out of a child honestly smacks of Spielberg. In a year less concentrated with male candidates, people would be talking Griffin Davis for Oscar nomination.
None of this is to say everyone will take to Jojo's humor or be moved by its emotion. The same swell toward sentimentality that plagued Life is Beautiful can be found here at times. Its most tragic event comes rather abruptly. The denouement is handled brilliantly in Jojo's and Elsa's choices and feelings. The very ending, though, is treacly, an accusation often also leveled at Begnini's film. We don't need three or four, depending how you count, over-sugared references to what has come before.
But look again with me at this whole year, one of massive risks. We have a one-shot war story. A four-hour Goodfellas from a streaming service. Two monumental, provocative reversals---one a reversal of Hollywood tragedy from Tarantino, another of tone from halfway across the planet. Jojo tops them all as the year's biggest risk.
And turn once more to Brooks. If we can agree on nothing else, the film accomplishes this in Waititi's portrayal of Hitler. "We take away from him the holy seriousness that always surrounded and protected him like a cordon."
Vier von vier
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