Jojo Rabbit

It’s Springtime for Hitler, again.

It’s no mean feat to make a comedy about a boy who admires Adolf Hitler and give it bite and charm, but Taika Waititi does just this with this prickly but endearing spoof of nazism, very loosely based on Christine Leunens’s book Caging Skies.

The biggest joke may be that Waititi, a New Zealander who is a Maori Jew, of all things, plays Adolf himself, as he appears as a friendly father figure in the imagination of Jojo Betzler (the excellent Roman Griffin Davis). A more exotic führer we’ll never see. First I was afraid that he was going to make Adolf cute, but this sly little satire shows him as a callous and careless monster through the eyes of the kid that idolizes him.

The movie starts with real footage of the incomprehensible frenzy that horrid little man used to cause in the average German citizen, particularly the frauleins, who are seen screaming like teenyboppers to the tune of the Beatles’ I want to hold your hand in German. Cults of personality may be innocuous enough for pop bands but are lethal for society.

Little Jojo has caught this insane führer fever. His mother (Scarlett Johansson) sends him to a Hitler Youth summer camp, where a drunken and defeated Nazi captain, (the always welcome Sam Rockwell) teaches children how to lob grenades, and teenage nazi sadists expect the kids to shoot bunnies to…