Messy Jojo Rabbit misses the sweet spot between farce and gravitas

Taika Waititi and Roman Griffin Davis in Jojo Rabbit. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

Jojo Rabbit is a mess, albeit a mess made with affection and care. Writer/director Taika Waititi sometimes gets across some of the points he wants and landing a couple of effective punches, but ultimately cannot maintain the gravitas he wants and needs. Jojo Rabbit is disappointing, but in a fairly interesting way. 

The film stars Roman Griffin Davis as the eponymous Jojo, a 10-year-old wannabe Nazi living in a quiet German village with his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson). After an incident with a grenade ends his dreams of serving Hitler, Jojo volunteers to work around town for the insouciant Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), his assistant Finkel (Alfie Allen), and Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson). Jojo is prone to an active imagination and many misperceptions about the Jewish people, which are spurred by frequent conversations with an imaginary Hitler (played by Waititi). Jojo's life shifts dramatically once he finds the young Jewish woman Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding from the Nazis in his home. Elsa's presence begins to shift Jojo's perspective on everything he knows, just as the war winds down and his village succumbs to chaos. 

There's a fair amount going on with Jojo Rabbit, and Waititi does pull some of it off. The film is fine as a coming of age story, even though the main character is a stone's throw away from being a Nazi. There's a nice little theme about finding heroism in the small moments, whether it's secretly placing anti-Nazi propaganda around town or expressing oneself amid tyranny. Waititi has some good points about how little effort it takes for outright stupidity to evolve into commonplace evil; it's easy to make fun of folks who believe Jewish people have horns, at least until they start slaughtering them based on that belief. The film's farcical nature cuts deepest with this point, due in part to the timeliness of such ideology. 

It's difficult for films to shift between absurdity and seriousness given how far the gap is between the two. Waititi, to his credit, sometimes succeeds at doing exactly that. One sequence in particular, a sequence where Jojo Rabbit takes a “heil Hitler” joke and turns it into a menacing moment for Elsa, is quite striking. It's a really stunning moment in which the films reminds viewers the initial the joke comes from a rather dark place and comes with terrible consequences. When Jojo Rabbit makes contact with its target, it hits with precision and force. But the film's batting average is right around the Mendoza line, failing more often than not to square up on those little moments of insight. The final battle scene, the moment when Jojo witnesses the consequences of his dreams, lacks the effectiveness found in the far smaller moment below. It's more silly than stern, suffering from the Life is Beautiful problem of taking an atrocity too lightly. 

The biggest issue with Jojo Rabbit is Waititi himself. His imaginary Hitler shifts the film's otherwise absurdist tone toward twee and cute, adding more layers to the film's constant tonal shifts. The violence meant to jolt the audience loses its effect because the tone is already too far above the grand for viewers to land in the midst of the horror. Having Hitler as an imaginary friend is the film's selling point, yet it's a joke doesn't go anywhere of interest. And his Hitler isn't an interesting take on the character; Mel Brooks took a similar approach around 50 years ago to much greater effect. Making Hitler flamboyant is also an easy choice, a simple way of converting a horror villain into a silly little thing. Jojo Rabbit has a lot of these uninspired decisions as lazy shorthand to the audience. Captain Klenzendorf's motivation for casually ignoring Nazism starts off as a really interesting study of a warrior no longer allowed to fight, but ends up as a gay joke. The soundtrack is uber literal, ending with the most obvious David Bowie song imaginable because lazy thematic resonance. This film is, or at least should be, more interesting than these choices. It should challenge the audience more often than it does, give them room to reflect a little about why they're laughing at the jokes. Jojo Rabbit ultimately loses its focus and can't deliver the knockout punch it winds up to strike.

Review: Three out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Comedy

tl;dr

What Worked: Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, Some Themes

What Fell Short: Taika Waititi's Hitler, Tonal imbalance, Banality

What To Watch As Well: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Producers

Infinity War a big, bold Avengers installment

Thanos (Josh Brolin) in a scene from Avengers: Infinity War. Image courtesy Disney.

Avengers: Infinity War makes it clear from the start exactly what the eponymous superhero group faces. The movie kicks off showing the brilliant power its villain Thanos (Josh Brolin) possesses, while hinting at just how zealous he is about it. Stakes matter in a movie as big and bold as Infinity War; viewers need to respect what the nearly two-dozen heroes have to battle against to make the necessary bloat worthwhile. The heroes in this movie aren't simply fighting the concept of amazing destruction, but a being legitimately powerful enough to make that happen. What they face is important, and the movie never lets up on how much they have to accomplish to win.

Infinity War is both the movie one would expect from Marvel's years of buildup and something largely unexpected. It's as big as it should be, littered with heroes ranging from franchise staples to new additions in the last decade or so of movies. Viewers get barbs lobbed between Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Star-Lord (Chris Pratt). Thor (Chris Hemsworth) chills with Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) and Groot (Vin Diesel). Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Vision (Paul Bettany), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Captain America (Chris Evans), Mantis (Pom Klementieff) Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Bucky (Sebastian Stan), and Drax (Dave Bautista) take on aliens and other malevolent beings. Spider-man (Tom Holland) is around being all doe-eyed and awkward. Almost everyone of note from a decade of movies is here, and Infinity War spends a lot of time ensuring they all get a few moments to shine. The result is an immense run time, although directors Anthony and Joe Russo keep the drag to a minimum, making for a pretty smooth 150-minute movie. 

 

Pretty much every aesthetic selling point is handled well in this movie. The action sequences are well coordinated and range from small melees to epic battles against alien beings. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s trademark jokes work more often than not, in large part because the addition of so many otherwise unconnected characters adds a new dynamic to the banter. On the most basic level, Infinity War is the movie people who have followed this franchise would want; the good stuff is there, and it's done rather well. And yet there's still a lot of unexpected bits to Infinity War. With the high stakes established so early, the tone of the movie is not as bright as the banter makes it appear. The jokes aren't as jovial or friendly as they usually are in Marvel films; in this case, the humor is rooted in fear and stress, a reaction to the situation the heroes face. The tone is less hopeful than before, more desperate and worrisome.

A lot of that has to do with how writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely plan their narrative. The film’s focus at first glance is stopping Thanos, the actual protagonist is Thanos himself. It's his quest to collect the Infinity Stones that drives the movie, his journey toward what he believes to be a better universe. The heart of Infinity War lies not amongst the collection of heroes, but with its villain. Brolin's Thanos is not a simple monster bent on destruction for the sake of destruction, or evil just because the film requires him to be the villain for the heroes to fight. The methods to his goal of creating balance in a chaotic universe are horrifying, but there remains an iota of logic to what he wants to accomplish. In his mind, he’s performing a selfless act, and its his fervor as much as the abundance of power he seeks that makes him so dominant. Fanaticism is incredibly dangerous, especially for an infinitely powerful being capable of sacrificing everything for what he deems to be a necessary cause.

 

Making a superhero movie based on the villain is an interesting, albeit counterintuitive choice. What it does though is give Infinity War a sense of urgency it didn’t have before, selling Thanos’ power and conviction to his cause. It makes for a fairly dark superhero movie, adding enough shade to a sunny franchise to keep the audience guessing at what comes next. There’s still reasons for optimism in the Marvel Universe, but they are far more difficult to find than ever been before.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 150 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away
Target audience: People who have watched MCU movies for the last 10 years, as well as anyone else into comic book movies.

Take the whole family?: The tone gets pretty heavy, and families who prefer to limit their children's exposure to violence should keep the kids home. Generally though this isn't too problematic.

Theater or Netflix?: Totally worth a trip to the cinema.

What happens next?: That is an enormous question. Looking at the upcoming slate of films – Ant-Man gets his sequel in a few months, followed by a Captain Marvel movie – gives a little idea of how things will play out. But given how this movie goes, there's a whole lot of room for interpretation for the next installment. Although that is half the fun of these movies; trying to figure out what happens next.

Watch this as well?: Just pick just about anything from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and you'll be in pretty good shape. D.C. has Wonder Woman, but that’s about it.

Sing consistently off-key

Buster Moon (Matthew McConaughey) in Sing. Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

Sing opens on a particularly illogical and nonsensical note and never rights its course, opting to run through more 108 minutes of crass jokes, flatulence jokes and an overabundance of Seth MacFarlane to end with something miles away from heartfelt. Sing isn't much of a film, yet it somehow doesn't cross into abhorrent or awful either; it's just annoyingly bad, too lazy and uninspired to do much more than exist and crank out pop music covered by famous actors and aspiring singers.

None of this is really all that surprising. The studio responsible for this, Illumination, is known for producing this type of fair. It has one solid film in Despicable Me and a whole mess of whatevers, including this summer's mediocre Secret Life of Pets. It's an uninteresting studio designed to make lower-budget animated films like Sing and earn a hefty profit in the process, rarely caring for artistic merit, good storytelling or sophisticated jokes. The studio never aspires to be Pixar, Disney, Studio Ghibli or even DreamWorks, although its films cost the same amount at the cinema as the films by the other four. Not every film is going to be Toy Story 3, Moana, My Neighbor Totoro, or Chicken Run, but you'd hope a studio would chuck in a modicum of effort into producing films. Illumination, however, doesn't seem too interested in actually doing something with its animation quality, plot or characters, hitting the proverbial notes as needed to create an overstuffed pile of meh. In a year with a pair of legitimately great animated films and a few OK ones, Sing is just there, waiting for the money to roll in from viewers with little else to do on a December afternoon.  

Usually a film like Sing has a clever idea or some promise that isn't fulfilled, a redeeming quality just under the surface to be positive about. That is very much not the case. The premise, about a collection of anthropomorphic regular folks (voiced by Scarlett Johansson as a porcupine, Reese Witherspoon as a pig, Tori Kelly as an elephant, Taron Egerton as a gorilla, Nick Kroll as another pig and the aforementioned MacFarlene as a mouse) competing in a talent competition run by Matthew McConaughey as a koala with bad business sense, isn't innovative or interesting on its own. Not a fatal flaw if the writers find something interesting to say about it, which they do not. Excluding a bizarre subplot involving MacFarlane's awful mouse wannabe lounge singer, the film never veers off the boring characters take their chance at stardom, doubt themselves, then rise up again to put on a whopper of a performance because that would require some thought and nuance, concepts this film prefers to avoid.

Well, technically the film does make a viewer think about the inane insanity of the film universe. Much of the soundtrack consists of covers of songs like Shake It Off, Call Me Maybe, My Way, Hallelujah, and Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing. An underlying issue though is how these animals are singing these songs; the original artists are never mentioned in animal form, yet they are part of the fabric of the film universe. Is this some sort of universe in which animals have copies of popular music produced by humans? Were the humans conquered recently a la Planet of the Apes, their music, clothes and cars the only remnants of the pre-animal conquered world? Are there animal versions of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Stevie Wonder and Leonard Cohen (RIP) floating around this animal universe? Really, is there a reason to have animal characters instead of humans? The answer to the last point is a resounding no, besides maybe a cuteness factor that is unrelated to the plot, script or good storytelling techniques.

The closest Sing gets to finding some emotional resonance is at the end, amid the grand performance the animals had worked so hard to perfect despite all the bland and easily avoidable obstacles in their way. After Kelly's elephant rocks out to an uninspired cover of a great Stevie Wonder song, a slight chill ran through my body and I thought maybe this film has found a place in my heart. Then I remembered I had walked through a heavy rain in November to get to this screening and my clothes were still soaked. I continued to shiver, my only comfort being that I won't have to watch Sing again any time soon.

Review: One and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 108 minutes

Genre: Animated
 

Ask Away

Target audience: Families who can't get tickets to Rogue One.

Take the whole family?: The film gets lazy with a couple of fart jokes, but on the whole there isn't anything objectionable about the content besides the quality.

Theater or Netflix?: Wait for home if you must watch it.

What's the deal with Seth MacFarlene?: He is the one character who bugs me more than anything else in this film. While the other characters are at least trying to do something with their lives, MacFarlene's mouse is awful, never really interested in redeeming himself. That his crappy character also offers MacFarlene to indulge in his fantasies of being Sinatra (when he's at best a C- Bublé)  is all the more frustrating.

Watch this instead?: There's still an animated musical in theaters that is leagues better than this thing. It’s called Moana.