N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott’s essay regarding Taika Watiti‘s “JoJo Rabbit” tries to compare the emptiness of Waititi’s film to the full-course satiric meal of Charlie Chaplin‘s “The Great Dictator” and Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”
“But what if we don’t live in that world?,” Scott asks. “For a long time, laughing at historical Nazis has seemed like a painless moral booster shot, a way of keeping the really bad stuff they represent safely contained in the past. Maybe that was always wishful thinking.
“Recent history shows that the medicine of laughter can have scary side effects. Fascism has crawled out of the dust pile of history, striking familiar poses, sometimes with tongue in cheek. It has been amply documented that ‘ironic’ expressions of bigotry and anti-Semitism — jokes and memes on social media; facetious trolling of the politically correct; slurs as exercises in free speech — can evolve over time into the real thing. A dress-up costume can be mistaken for a uniform, including by its wearer.”
Scott’s reasonings as to why Waititi’s anti-Nazi comedy, satire, whatever you wish to call it, doesn’t have the same effect as its obvious forebearers is pretty spot-on. It also nags me to no-end that ‘Jojo’ is being marketed as “an anti-hate satire,” which says a lot about the amount of unwarranted self-importance that’s in the movie.
I saw ‘Jojo’ at its Toronto International Film Festival world premiere, but my reaction was quite similar to Scott’s; what exactly was the point of it all? Why bring out 75-year-old skeletons to the forefront of the mainstream? Its message fell flat because the parallels Waititi is trying to draw between the then and now are tonally and thematically misbegotten.
Will Academy voters feel the same way? Directors tend to respect directors who swing big, and having Villeneuve publicly champion your film doesn't hurt.