Director: Taika Waititi
Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Scarlet Johansson
Have I Seen It Before?: Never. Regretfully, painfully, I missed it in the theater. I desperately wanted to go, but the timing never worked out, and so I’m left with a Blu Ray.
Did I like it?: Oh, man…
For some, the precarious moral stretch to make a movie about a boy (Davis) and his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi) is never going to work. Especially now, the business of anything even resembling moral equivalency within twenty miles of fascism gives one the ickiest of icky feelings.
A lesser filmmaker (myself included, although I would have probably chickened out at the funny Nazi movie, and you would have, too) would have been so wrapped up in the tone of the piece that they would have insisted on shying away from the horror and evil of the time, content in the fact that it will still appropriately loom over the smarter audience members.
Here, the horror of everything is real from the beginning, and in one of the best balancing acts in my cinema memory, the jokes are woven seamlessly into the tragedy.
All right, sure, one can easily make the argument that the need for a “good” Nazi—in the face of the Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell)—is not far enough removed from the ethical insanity that has so thoroughly mired our recent history, but I think that is the wrong read on the character. Klenzendorf isn’t the Nazi with a heart of gold. He’s just as much of a shit as the rest of them, and as all Nazis must eventually do, he is a broken shell of a man. Every idiotic thing he ever believed in has come crashing down around him as the allies approach the fatherland. With that, he does decide to do two decent things with his last acts on Earth. It doesn’t redeem him; it gives him a moment of comfort to realize that at least his death can be of use, even if his life wasn’t.
Oh, did I mention the movie’s also one of the funnier ones in years? Well, it is. I probably should have spent more of the review talking about that, but why dwell on that, when you should really be watching it right now for yourself.