Jojo Rabbit

Taika Waititi’s film comes from Christine Leunens’ 2008 novel Caging Skies, and the direction of the adaptation fits in one sentence. Waititi’s first pass followed the book as a straight, unrelieved drama; then, in his own words, he took the bones of that story and added Hitler and jokes. None of the comedy is in the novel. All of it is the film’s contribution. The script landed on the Black List in 2012 and waited years for money, finally made for fourteen million dollars. Shooting happened in the Czech Republic. Interiors were built at Barrandov studios in Prague, the same stages that turned out Nazi propaganda during the occupation. Exteriors came from towns such as Žatec and Úštěk where prewar streets survive intact, and roughly half of the two hundred visual effects shots were invisible set extensions. The structural trick is this: imaginary Hitler runs as the comic engine through the first act, then is deliberately withdrawn as the boy’s picture of the world corrects itself. The jokes are rationed against you. The cruellest turn arrives on the sight of a pair of shoes, with no musical preparation beforehand. Right for a viewer who takes Hitler here as a ten-year-old’s cartoon rather than a historical portrait. Wrong for a reader expecting the novel’s sober register, which is broken on purpose.