Jojo Rabbit

Jojo Rabbit was released towards the end of 2019 and nominated for quite a host of awards.  Directed by Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit's screenplay was based very very loosely on Christine Leunens's 2019 novel Caging Skies.

Setting aside the faithfulness of the screenplay to the novel, politically and historically correctness, Jojo Rabbit is a campy narrative of the absurdness of propaganda on the minds of children and a light-hearted reminder to never forget the horrors.

Set towards the end of World War II, Johannes is a ten-year old boy in the Deutsches Jungvolk, whose father had died while fighting in Italy.  His older sister is implied to have died too, with her bedroom maintained as if she were still alive in the family townhouse.  Johannes' mother tries her best to remain cheerful and playmocks her son's infatuation with the Nazi doctrine.  Evidently her sympathies lie elsewhere and Johannes found her hanging in the townsquare one day.

Injured, Johannes spent a lot of time at home and discovered a Jewish girl (his late sister's friend) that his mother had hidden behind the walls of his late sister's bedroom.

The Gestapo came by one day to search the house.  Johannes was unable to produce his Deutsches Jungvolk knife which the Jewish girl kept.  The Jewish girl came out of her hiding place with the knife and was confirmed to be Johannes' sister by Captain K who ran the Deutsches Jungvolk.

The movie closed with Johannes and the Jewish girl dancing on the doorstep after a vehicle with an American flag drove by, signaling the defeat of Germany in the European theatre of the War.

Jojo Rabbit was campy good fun, and certainly a very light-hearted narrative from a child's perspective, quite unlike the bleak hopelessness horrors in the memoirs of many Holocaust survivors.  Johannes had conjured up his imaginary friend Adolf Hitler, in place of his absent father, and failed to understand his mother's sympathies of the non-Nazi supporting Germans and Jewish people.  Rebel Wilson's character also sprouted a lot of heresy about the Jewish people which Johannes gradually came to realize were untrue as he interacted more and more with the hidden Jewish girl.

It was refreshing to see Scarlett Johansson out of the Black Widow character as a sensible mother who tried to maintain her son's innocence while ribbing him about his obsession with Nazism.  

Some critics may criticize the decision to portray Captain K as a sympathetic character.  Captain K had snatched the papers from the Jewish girl and quizzed her on her name and birthday, saving her from being captured by the Gestapo when the girl had answered the birthday wrongly.  He also removed Johannes' Deutsches Jungvolk jacket and hat and spat at him, saving Johannes from being executed as a Nazi by the Soviets, and told Johannes to "take care of your sister".  I didn't think this was a flaw of the screenplay.  Captain K was always portrayed as being half drunk and sloppily dressed in his Nazi uniform, even when he was running activities for the Deutsches Jungvolk.  Perhaps this was a hint that Captain K's sympathies lie elsewhere, much like Johannes' mother?

For me, the message of Jojo Rabbit, as Johannes had so amply demonstrated, is that real interaction, rather than simply accepting what is being told, may help decipher nonsense from the truth.