The best thing about this film is the premise: a young boy growing up in a little town in war time Germany believes has Hitler as an imaginary friend. Unfortunately the movie does not really satisfy the promise of that proposition. It is eager to set up the innocence and whimsy of youth against the misery of war and the ludicrous buffoonery of Nazism. But it unfortunately doesn't quite fill that gap.

It is a funny movie. Yet it is not a comedy. At the core of the film is the relationship between Jojo and his mother. It is the very definition of bittersweet. The mother has not only the difficult task of raising Jojo alone, but she is also engaged in some sort of resistance movement. Jojo on the other hand has completely fallen to antisemetic propaganda and is very proud to be a devoted Nazi, and he is living his childhood without understanding the world around him nor the ideas he pretends to love so much.

It is an interesting dynamic, and you almost did not need the wacky Hitler insert. Yet, the tension of this relationship is not necessarily apparent, until Jojo finds a girl living in the attic. And it is through her that, unbeknownst to the mother, that Jojo goes back from fervent Nazi to eleven year old-boy. The girl in the attic is the element that makes him connect with his mother in a way he could not do directly. Elsa is also the way we the audience learn about the mother in a more intimate way. We see that she maintains a distance towards Jojo, obviously in order to protect him, and furthermore to protect his innocence.

Now that being said, the movie leans way more wacky than serious. And that is where I disengaged. The story has something real to show, but it gets distracted by gags and eccentric Nazi characters. Jojo and Elsa's confrontation is by essence juvenile; but then the other characters also operate in this quirky funny tone: the army officers are secretly flamboyantly gay, the Gestapo officer is ridiculous, the children are way too indoctrinated. None of it is bad or unfunny, but it diverts from the emotional arc.

It is minor nitpick, but the movie portrays Nazis as the image that pop-culture has assigned to them. Not that it makes a difference, but I feel it would have been more interesting if the movie had taken a more realistic historic approach. In this film the Nazis are stereotypical. They are not an oppressive machine nor a threat to freedom, they are just there to be antisemites and being oblivious.

There was an interesting theme going with Sam Rockwell's character, as the shell-shocked veteran, but the film left it unexplored.

During the film, I was reminded of how La Vita è Bella was aiming for a similar premise: second world war though the eyes of a child, and how good that movie was. Jojo Rabbit may be a modern update of that story, but it does not quite measure to it. The difference being that La vita e bella was less plastic, it was less reliant on wacky tricks to get you to agree with it. Jojo Rabbit is clever and funny but it does not quite touch at the heartstrings in the same way.