A dark, stylized comedy leads us into the light
EVEN THOUGH FILMMAKERS AS REVERED AS CHARLIE Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch have made movies that lampoon the Nazis and their one-note obsessions, Holocaust humor is still a delicate proposition. Laughter may be one of humankind’s best survival mechanisms, but jokes about Hitler and those who did his bidding aren’t an easy sell—their crimes are too inhumane to allow for laughs.
That’s the turf Taika Waititi steps onto with his incandescently strange and openhearted black comedy Roman Griffin Davis plays Jojo, a tyke growing up in 1940s Germany who, with his rapturous smile and blond hair combed up into merengue-like tufts, would be adorable except for one thing: at 10, he’s already a Hitler zealot. He loves his country’s leader so much, he appears to have conjured a sort of Hitler hologram:
