Nazis and New York Blues
Nazis and New York Blues
The Long, Wonderful Weekend
January 20, 2020
A Weekend With Scarlett Johansson
Marriage Story (2019) and Jojo Rabbit (2019)
Marriage Story and Jojo Rabbit are both such masterful movies that they certainly deserve their own, large space where we can pile on the praise and exhaust the superlatives.
And since Scarlett Johansson has been at the top of her game for so long while also continuing to break new ground she also merits her own pedestal, but we imagine she won't mind sharing the attention with the art where her brilliance takes form.
Johansson has earned a rare double from the Oscars, getting nominated for both Marriage Story in the Best Actress category and Jojo Rabbit as Best Supporting Actress and while she probably won't make history by winning both, the fact that she's in the running is, in itself, a triumph.
We watched these films on back-to-back nights, and have rarely had a better weekend.
Marriage Story give us Johansson as Nicole, an actress married to Charlie, played by Adam Driver (who is also nominated, deservedly) and their marriage has fallen apart. She wants to move from New York back to her native Los Angeles while he wants to stay in New York where he is a successful playwright. And their eight-year-old son is stuck in the middle.
Their son, just as any child of divorce, is caught between warring parents but he, just as any child of divorce, is not the problem. The problem is Johansson and Driver still love each other but just not enough. Or just not in the right way. It's painful.
Marriage Story excels in showing us that divorce is not just the separation of two people, or if there are kids, three, four or more people. Many, many people are involved. Friends, family, co-workers and the lawyers. The very, very expensive lawyers.
Love breaks you and divorce makes you broke.
And while we wish director and writer Noah Baumbach had given Johansson's and Driver's characters jobs that we can more easily relate to, we do easily make a connection with their financial fears. Marriage Story deserves as much applause for its well-presented exposition of divorce and its ugliness, financial and otherwise, as it does its emotional rollercoaster.
All of this is aided by wonderful supporting performances from Julie Hagerty, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta and the ever-cool Laura Dern whose rant about the expectations put on mothers is one of our favorite movie moments of the year.
Marriage Story isn't always easy. But it's almost completely true.
Jojo Rabbit, on the other hand, is a whole bunch of lies wrapped in comedic horror. How's this for your premise? A ten year-old boy is a member of the Hitler Youth at the tail end of World War II and his imaginary friend is none other than Adolf Hitler. A very funny and silly Adolf Hitler.
Jojo is played by Roman Griffin Davis whom we had never heard from before but quickly came to adore. Johansson plays his mother and their relationship is quirky, funny, from the heart and lovely. She is a loving mom, a funny mom, a practical mom and she is always there to tie her son's shoes.
Jojo wants to be a good Nazi and tries to ingratiate himself with his fellow members of the Third Reich -including Sam Rockwell and Rebel Wilson - in any way he can. He is aided in this not just by his imaginary Hitler but also by his pal Yorki, a bespectacled, chubby little member of the master race who, as the war is coming to a close, says something that's harshly indisputable: "It's not a good time to be a Nazi."
We don't want to spoil anything here but we believe it's safe ground to tread on when we let you know that Jojo, as much as he tries, is not really a Nazi, something that is pointed out to him by a Jewish girl played by Thomasin McKenzie. He's just a kid who wants to fit in. Jojo Rabbit understands that from the outset, as the opening credits are accompanied by an anachronistic rendition of the Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand -in German, no less. We have heard Komm gib mer deiner Hand many times before, but we'll never listen to it the same way ever again.
Nazis were not funny. War is not cute. Hatred is not ironic. So, you might fairly ask, how dare this movie to try making them so? But Jojo Rabbit is not trying to make these things acceptable. Jojo Rabbit is making us see, through the journey of a special boy, just how ridiculous conformity can be. Just how deadly it can be.
This movie is hilarious and heartbreaking. It is immature, yet important. We have not read Christine Leunens' novel, Caging Skies, upon which this film is based, but we know it must have taken her a lot of gumption (and talent) to write it. And a lot of courage is shown by Taika Waititi for writing the screenplay, directing and playing Hitler on screen.
When did it become acceptable to portray Adolf Hitler as not the murderous piece of crap he truly was but instead as a pathetic buffoon? It has been going on in Hollywood for years. Maybe we still cannot quite accept, after all this time, that Hitler was, indeed, a pathetic buffoon who, because of fear, weakness and God knows what else, nearly destroyed the world.
Jojo Rabbit, as offensive as it can be, is a world where we see how easily tenderness and intelligence can be assaulted by fear and insecurity. It puts us in a boy's shoes and a mother's heart. It could be Germany in 1944 or America today. As long as that mother is Scarlett Johansson, that heart will be warm. Because whether it's a divorce, or a war, her love will see us through. --TK
Tuesday, January 21, 2020