Jojo Rabbit (2019)

(On Cable TV, August 2020) The premise of Jojo Rabbit is strikingly unappealing (a young German boy, in WW2 Germany, has Hitler as an imaginary friend and befriends a Jewish girl hidden in his attic, as the Nazis close in a start purging non-patriotic Germans) but if there’s any filmmaker who could make it work, that would be Taika Waititi, whose off-beat sense of humour has led to a string of films far better than their premise would suggest. So it is that from its first moments, Jojo Rabbit plays on a knife’s edge of discomfort, applying an ironic comedy filter on events that, in other hands, would have been yet another tragic-but-dull WW2 drama. This is really and constantly not a film to be watched at a surface level, as it plays for laughs while camouflaging some terrible things. Yet it still manages to earn its dramatic moments later on. There’s an interesting mastery of craft here, as Waititi hits his off-beat beats along the way. I don’t exactly love the results, but I’m impressed enough with them.