Jojo Rabbit.

Jojo Rabbit won the People’s Choice award at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, a rather significant honor given that the previous year’s winner was the dreadful Green Book … which ended up winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Jojo is nominated for the latter honor, although there doesn’t seem to be much sentiment that it’ll win, which is a marginal improvement; it’s a lot better than Green Book, but it’s a really uneven film that seems unable to decide whether it’s a comedy and ends up with too many jokes that don’t quite land.

Based on a book by Christine Leunens called Caging Skies, Jojo Rabbit takes place late in World War II andfollows the title character, a a ten-year-old Hitler Youth member who has become a true believer to the point that his imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi, who directed and wrote the screenplay). Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) lives with his mother (Scarlett Johansson); his sister has just died of influenza, and his father is gone, presumably fighting at the front. After injuring himself while training with the Hitler Youth, Jojo ends up doing menial tasks around town and spending more time at home, which leads him to discover that his mother has been hiding a Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). The two embark on an entertaining dialogue where he starts out spouting the anti-Semitic nonsense he’s been taught by the Nazi regime, while she taunts him to try to keep him from saying anything about her presence, even to his mother; over time, of course, his prejudices break down and the two form a friendship that is tested by outside events.

Satire has a point, while farce exists just to send up its target. Jojo Rabbit doesn’t work as satire, but it’s moderately successful as farce. The targets here are the Nazis, and their adherents; Jojo is indoctrinated by the adults and older kids around him, never questioning what he’s told, even though his own mother tries to undermine their messages of hate and aggression. Waititi has made them largely ridiculous, from his own performance as Hitler to Sam Rockwell’s one-eyed Nazi Captain to Stephen Merchant’s Gestapo officer to Alfie Allen’s dimwitted officer, which is amusing but doesn’t really get us anywhere in the end. The Nazis weren’t objects of comedy, and the film spends more time showing them being absurd or stupid than it does showing them doing the horrible things they actually did. To be effective as a film, it either needed a stronger theme, or to be consistently funny; Jojo Rabbit lacks the former, and it’s only inconsistent at the latter. There are some laugh-out-loud moments, but it’s more a series of jokes that make you chuckle along with some that just don’t work, which makes the tonal shifts to the film’s few extremely serious moments even harder to absorb. (The posters that make this look like a screwball comedy don’t do the film any favors either.)

By far, the funniest character in the film is Jojo’s best friend Yorki, played by Archie Yates, who my daughter pointed out is a dead ringer for Russell in Up. He gets the best lines, he has the film’s best visual gag, and his delivery and affect are consistently hilarious. Merchant probably does more to strike the right balance between comedy and satire than anyone else in the film, with Waititi making him appear even more ridiculous with camera shots from low enough that Merchant appears to be about eight feet tall (he’s 6’7″). Rebel Wilson has a side role that she clearly relishes but that is just the same gag repeated over and over, funny just because she’s so absurdly enthusiastic about it. Most disappointing, however, is Waititi himself, who is surprisingly unfunny in the caricature of the imaginary Hitler; he’s kind of doing Viago again, with a sort of German-adjacent accent, and most of the jokes seem to revolve about how dumb he is, or around Waititi moving his arms and legs in a silly manner.

Scarlett Johansson earned one of her two Oscar nominations this year for her role as Jojo’s mother, and she is quite good, although I could make an argument that Thomasin McKenzie’s role and performance are ultimately more important to the film as a whole. (She also appears in the upcoming film adaptation of the Booker-winning novel The True History of the Kelly Gang with George MacKay of 1917 and Russell Crowe.) Johansson is charming, but the character is a bit one-note, while McKenzie has to explore a much wider range of emotions, and Jojo Rabbit couldn’t work without her. That the film works at all, and ends up a solid-average watch overall, is as much a credit to her performance as Elsa as anything else. There’s just no way I’d support this for Best Picture, given what else is nominated.