As I sort through my up-and-down thoughts on this movie – mostly up – I find myself settling on the notion that it’s most effective when I think of it as a gloss on two of its weightier lines.
One of those comes in a haunting moment when, as the heartbreakingly innocent Jojo is walking with his too-good-to-be-true mother Rosie, they come across a row of Germans who have been executed and left to hang as warning to any others who might object to the Nazi state. Jojo asks, “What did they do.”
His mother replies, “What they could.”
It’s a quiet and powerful moment when it happens, but – for me at least – it simmers throughout the movie and eventually stands as a kind of apologia for Rosie and her decisions. She, like all decent Germans, is faced with confronting national insanity. There’s almost nothing she can do against a culture that’s corrupted not just in its moral direction, but also in its ontological: these people are spread a steady stream of untruths – a point that screenwriter/director Taika Waititi brilliantly sends up in the opening scenes when Jojo and his friend go to an absurd learn-to-be-a-Nazi children’s day camp – and she has to perform a masquerade in order to survive in a world governed by those untruths.
But Rosie is a woman who does more than simply survive. She’s committed to raising Jojo, which is all the more heartbreaking a fact as we slowly learn that her older daughter has died, but she’s also risking her life to protect Elsa, a Jew on the brink of leaving adolescence and becoming a young woman. And, as the Nazi armies lose ground in the war – with Hitler already killing himself – she pushes to do even more, circulating handbills that somehow support a resistance that we presume will save lives.
It’s not enough. It never could be, and the harrowing scene in which Jojo finds her hanging as an executed traitor punches through any illusion that it is. She’s done what she could, though, in an impossible time, and it stamps her as a purely heroic figure.
I do have some problems with the scene. It’s dark in a way that the movie hasn’t prepared us for, and it seems to demand that we break away from the largely comic tone that’s preceded it.
Still, Waititi reminds us immediately of the central premise of that tone. He’s established that Jojo cannot yet tie his shoes. Hugging his mother’s legs and sobbing in near despair, he notices that her shoes are loose. He stops a moment and ties them – or nearly does. It’s not enough; he’s still too young and too affected by his fantasy friendship with Hitler. It’s still something, though. And, in retrospect, he’s done what he could.
And, while it takes him a while to realize it, he tries to do even more when he sets out to rescue Elsa.
None of that would work, though, without a range of striking shots and remarkable acting. I was not in the mood to watch a Holocaust film, but I couldn’t look away from Waititi’s peculiar camera work. There’s a lot reminiscent of Wes Anderson in the way he holds his camera still and gives us brightly colored, postcard-like images.
At the same time, his signature shot seems to cut something off. Characters’ legs – or in the powerful shot of the executed Rosie, her torso – extend out of the frame, and, unlike with Anderson, we seldom get the full set in one shot. There’s always something implied but unseen, some piece of the the image that doesn’t fit in the frame, and the result is an underlying aesthetic that supports the notion that Jojo can’t comprehend the full situation in which he finds himself.
And the actors seem to get it too. Scarlett Johansson has it easy in some ways since she is the only character who both understands all that’s taking place and then acts on it. Still, she is lying to Jojo about surface truths – trying to make him think he’s safe in a world that isn’t, pretending to a capacity for joy and sexual potential that she doesn’t feel, and, in a great scene, explicitly performing the role of his absent father by rubbing fireplace ash into a beard – while holding onto the one, core truth: she will do what she can to save him and forestall some of the insanity of the world around her.
Sam Rockwell is remarkable too. His Klenzendorf is a man who, like Jojo, has surrendered to fantasy, though he lacks the excuse of being a child. Having lost an eye in combat, he thinks of himself still as a potential German hero. When we first meet him, he demonstrates that he can’t distinguish firing a gun from hitting a target. In the closing, surreal scene where he takes part in the final defense of Berlin, he actually comes out in the be-feathered and caped costume he once doodled away on, imagining himself always as an ideal of his Fatherland.
Then, in his final moment, we see him wrestling with his repressed understanding of the extent to which he is part of a masquerade. For one brief moment, he drops his pretense and – stripping off the Nazi jacket that would mark Jojo for potential harassment from the victorious Allied troops – becomes fleetingly the one legitimate father figure Jojo encounters (with the possible exception of Rosie in her ash beard). He tells him to get home. Then, having made him safe, he sells his performance by pretending to turn on Jojo, and shouts in the voice of a swaggering Nazi colonel that he won’t tolerate a world of Jews and Allied armies. It costs him his life, but it helps secure Jojo’s safety. It is, to go back to the refrain, all he could do.
And Alfie Allen proves the old axiom that there are no small parts, only small actors. I’m not sure he has a single line in the film, but he’s nearly perfect in playing Finkel, the handsome but dim lieutenant/homosexual lover of Klenzendorf. He’s a man committed to literalism, unable to distinguish the real from the imagined. In his signature moment, when ordered to round up a handful of German Shepherds to help in the defense, he has recruited a handful of older men who – as keepers of sheep – are indeed German Shepherds. (One of the many great Waititi sight gags comes in the final 400 Blows inspired final battle when we see the old shepherds gallantly charging at the Allied troops.) Throughout, Allen finds a way to play it all straight, to keep the fundamental absurdity of his role in balance with its surface seriousness. He is, in his quiet way, the perfect Nazi – a man committed to an heroic ideal that’s possible only without a sense of nuance, a man who can function only to the degree that he is following the orders of others.
But none of it works without the work of Roman Griffin Davis, who turns in what might be the finest performance by a child actor I can remember – certainly by a boy. He is endlessly interesting in the way he expresses himself. He’s a child who’s constantly challenged by the fact that what he has been told is true – what he wants to be the easy truth of the world – is not entirely true. He never has a moment of full comprehension (unless that’s the case in the closing dance scene of the film) but we see him reflecting on one insight after another. He can’t figure it all out, but that’s OK because we see his impulse to keep doing so. It’s only at the very end, when he bends down to tie Elsa’s shoes, that we see how he has finally mastered one thing his mother kept teaching him and around which she had endless patience in his failing forward.
Somehow Davis is always fresh, always surprised by the world around him. He gives the impression of never getting the joke, never quite understanding what the grown-ups around him are doing, but of always almost recognizing that there is a joke. He’s a beautiful kid, and, with his not-quite-straight teeth and ever-widened eyes, he holds the movie together as the hope for a future that will come after the greater madness passes.
So, yeah, I admired the film, but I also found myself tiring of much of it by the end. I was frustrated with what I felt was Waititi’s insufficient grappling with the weight of Rosie’s death, and I began to tire of the almost too-perfectness of the victims. Thomasin McKenzie as Elsa seemed simply too beautiful, too easy for Rosie and then Jojo to agree to take care of. I kept seeing her as a young Natalie Portman (who did first come to major notice for playing Anne Frank, another perfectly sympathetic Jewish girl in an attic), and wondered how the film would be different if she’d been too old, too unattractive, or too starved to serve as a love interest.
I also began to wonder how Waititi could extricate himself from the box he was in. In a film where he’d killed off so many of his intriguing characters, he seemed to have left himself nowhere else to go. I couldn’t imagine him killing off Jojo – that would be way too dark – and I vowed I wouldn’t forgive him if he gratuitously killed Jojo’s one best friend, Yorki (who, drafted into the Nazi army at age 11, becomes another of the chess pieces that Waititi cleverly exploits in the gathering mayhem of the final several minutes). And I couldn’t imagine it working if Jojo’s father returned without explanation or Elsa had a moment of clear, safe exit.
Then, in what I think is both the most memorable scene of the film as well as Davis’s finest moment among many, we have the dance. Elsa has told Jojo that the first thing she’ll do when she’s free is dance. She’s just seen that he briefly lied to her about the Nazi’s having won as a way to keep her for himself, and she’s slapped him. But then, without immediate explanation, the two lapse into the best dance scene in a non-dance film since John Travolta and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.
It’s such a great sequence that I wanted to love it, but I was also frustrated that the film hadn’t yet come to terms with the death of Rosie, with the larger ontological crisis of Nazi propaganda undermining reality, or with the narrative arc of what would happen next. I was taken with the visual but inclined to see it as unearned, as a way of dodging the deepest implications of the film.
And then, in a final frame, Waititi put up the words of the other line that – in retrospect – gives weight to the entire film. Elsa has already quoted the Rilke, but seeing it as text changes it: “No feeling is final,” Rilke declares.
I have long felt that Rilke understands the grand movement of emotion better than any poet I know. (I often paraphrase him from Letters to a Young Poet on the idea that the seeds of our coming sadness are sown in our greatest joy and that the seeds of our coming joy are sown in the midst of sadness we can’t see beyond.) In that closing line, I see Waititi changing, or at least justifying the tone he’s brought to his Holocaust film. He gives himself license to open with an upbeat version of The Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and then to close with a danceable David Bowie’s “Heroes” – both sung in German – because this is not 1944 with Berlin in ruins and a shell-shocked world coming to terms with Jewish survivors.
Instead, we are at least two generations removed. As a world, we have survived the Nazi insanity, and we have not allowed it to define us. We have the power as artists to cast Hitler as a slapstick buffoon – which is precisely how Waititi himself plays him – and we have the opportunity to move on.
No feeling is final. We could, and indeed we must, mourn the death of Rosie. And we must – and indeed we are, through this very film – resist the ontological assault of a current American government (or at least President) committed to pushing untruths as reality.
But if we give in only to mourning, if we believe the despair of Adorno’s warning that there can be no art after Auschwitz, then we give to Hitler (and, in a lesser way, to Trump) a lingering power over us.
In the end, we cannot allow any feeling to be final. The film wrestles with a great many possibilities, but it leaves us with a liberating image of a beautiful boy and a beautiful young woman owning a moment of freedom in a world that will surely try to snatch that freedom away again. And yet they dance with a comic joy that tells us that, when the next threat comes, we cannot allow it to be final either. We’ll be called on to do what we can and then, at whatever price we pay, to remember that there will be something that belies that finality as well.
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