First still from the set of WW2 satire, JOJO RABIT. (From L-R): Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) has dinner with his imaginary friend Adolf (Writer/Director Taika Waititi), and his mother, Rosie (Scarlet Johansson). Photo by Kimberley French. © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

First still from the set of WW2 satire, JOJO RABIT. (From L-R): Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) has dinner with his imaginary friend Adolf (Writer/Director Taika Waititi), and his mother, Rosie (Scarlet Johansson). Photo by Kimberley French. © 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation All Rights Reserved

Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) is a young volunteer in the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth).  Jojo possesses a “snake mind, wolf body, panther courage, and a German soul,” if his imaginary friend is to be believed.  Given that his imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi), we can see how authority appeals to the insecure.

“‘Heil’ at me, man.  Just throw it at me,” cajoles Imginary Hitler.  Invigorated by his pep speech, Jojo feels he can take on the world, only to face ridicule from the older cadets when he refuses to break a rabbit’s neck to prove his ferocity.  “Jojo Rabbit!” they taunt, “Scared little rabbit.  Maybe we should snap your neck, too.”

Following another misguided pep speech, Jojo rushes in during a grenade exercise, to have it blow up in his face.  After recovery and rehabilitation, he’s sent home from training to police the community under the direction of his former Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell vaguely resembling Amon Göth), busted down to baby-sitting an entire group of kids unfit for field duty.

Says Klenzendorf, who draws up designs for a fringed dress uniform and a plumed helmet, “I was about to teach the HJ boys about underwater warfare training just in case they go to battle in a pool.”

Jojo, like many ten year old children, believes most of what he’s told—in this case, that Jews are horned monsters with forked tongues and psychic powers—until he befriends one, Elsa (Thomasin Mackenzie), hiding in a secret room in his mother’s home.  She resembles his sister, Inge, who recently died.  Initially, Elsa indulges the pre-teen Jojo with even more outlandish myths.  Then she trolls him into reading Rilke—because her boyfriend did, or so we’re told.  Simply by knowing him, she becomes tangible and familiar.  And this is the crux of JOJO RABBIT’s take on hatred.

Jojo’s most familiar faces are those of his best friend, Yorki (Archie Yates), and his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson).  His father departed, for the front he was told, though his bullies in the Hitlerjugend insist he was a deserter.  Jojo’s entire world view is through the lens of his mother eye—she puts on greasepaint and a Nazi jacket to effect his father in a pantomime recounting a strained relationship.  As the story progresses, one might notice a few resemblances between his mother’s and Imaginary Hitler’s mannerisms—the latter an amalgam of his mother’s affection and Jojo’s constrained world view.

Critics of JOJO are quick to condemn its glib attitude and omission of heaps of atrocities, but to a ten year old in what sense is genocide tangible?  The more gun deaths we hear about every day, the more impersonal a statistic they become.  Neo-Nazis are, in a very real sense, as emotionally- and intellectually-stunted as a ten year old boy.  They believe insanely stupid shit.   It’s not merely because they haven’t read Rilke, but because they haven’t experienced or staked real, personal loss.  Young children don’t work, they don’t earn, they don’t stake, they don’t lose.  The older recruits typically live either in massive privilege or extreme poverty—again having little to lose, one way or another.  And until they do, nothing becomes real except what they hear from anyone who promises them the supposedly unconditional love offered by identity, by belonging.

While the film doles out platitudes the adult in us finds overtly simplistic for complicated times, e.g. when Rosie says, “I love my country.  It’s the war I hate,” or, “Love is the strongest thing in the world,” Johansson delightfully surprises with affection and sincerity.  Thomasin Mackenzie delivers a defiant rebuttal against Eurocentric exceptionalism, as Inge fearlessly exclaims, “I am from those who wrestled angels and killed giants!”

History is, as Göring put it, written by the victors.  The future, unwritten, belongs to children of vision who can see past the mess we’ve created.