Life is Beautiful in a post-Jojo world

I've finally finished the movies I had borrowed from the library, which at one point were due back next Monday, the 18th. When I looked yesterday, they are now due ... June 27th. I sincerely hope the libraries will be open again before that, but who knows.

I learned the new due date before I watched Life is Beautiful, so I certainly could have put off the viewing. But it was already what I had planned for the evening last night, so I just went ahead with it.

The title of this post makes it sound like I am going to explore something profound today. Really, I just mean that having seen (and loved) Jojo Rabbit last year made me interested in revisiting the thing I saw it most regularly compared to. I had not seen Life is Beautiful since the autumn of 1998, when I was in graduate school in New York.

I quite liked Life is Beautiful at the time, ranking it my #16 out of the 58 movies I ranked in 1998. But the movie has suffered in our collective estimation over the years. Suffice it to say, when people compared Jojo Rabbit to Life is Beautiful, they did not mean it as a compliment.

Having randomly borrowed Life is Beautiful from the library, back when I had no idea I wouldn't be borrowing another movie for more than two months, gave me the opportunity to see if they're right.

Now, I should start by saying that the two movies don't actually have that much in common in terms of their plots. For starters, Jojo Rabbit never actually sets foot inside a concentration camp. But both movies do fall under the general umbrella of "movies that are trying to be funny despite featuring Nazis." When The Next Picture Show podcast chose an older movie to compare and contrast with Jojo, they selected The Producers. There's something valid about both choices, though both are also a stretch in certain ways.

One interesting difference is that while Jojo spends all its time in Nazi Germany, Life is Beautiful is not actually a holocaust movie for much of its running time. Although there are ominous little nuggets of what's to come, Beautiful spends its entire first hour in an idyllic Italian village, functioning mostly as a series of meet cutes between Roberto Benigni's Guido and Nicoletta Braschi's Dora, or "Principessa." How many meet cutes does one movie need, you might ask? Life is Beautiful has never met a meet cute it didn't like, so it puts in 17 of them. In fact, my primary memory of the first half of this movie is Guido running around a restaurant and repeatedly calling her Principessa. Even then it straddled the line between sweet and unctuous.

The issue, of course, was that Benigni had made primarily madcap farces in which his own talent for physical comedy took center stage. He was a bit of a Charlie Chaplin in that sense -- still is, I suppose, as he is still alive. Life is Beautiful was a change to something more serious, but even then, it required a lot of the silly to get there. Good silly, but still silly. The movie people should have compared it to, if they didn't -- though they probably did -- was Chaplin's The Great Dictator.

The approach mostly works, but I couldn't help feel now, as I did then, that there's a lot of filler in that first hour. While the set pieces are, without exception, sort of delightful, many of them don't provide the film with much momentum toward where it's going. A scene that does, but still kind of falls short of the mark, is one where Guido poses as a fascist official in order to get closer to Principessa, not realizing that he is visiting her school for the purposes of talking about the racial superiority of white people. He takes the piss out of that argument, of course, before the real official shows up and prompts him to flee through the nearest window. But the movie doesn't really do anything to ponder the significance of that scene at that moment, meaning it's not really building toward something.

While the first hour does allow us to get to know Guido and Dora, and to like them (unless we're already rolling our eyes at them), it ends up feeling like a lot of build-up before they are shipped off to the camps. That said, I don't think we could have handled a lot more of the film's second half. Not that it's bleak, but that it kind of continues hitting the same marks as Guido tries desperately to prove to his son that they are involved in a game, and they have to do all the right things to score 1,000 points and win a tank.

This is a good idea too, and effectively carried off, for the most part. But the way it's executed, it tends to diminish the presence of the others around them who are there and suffering through the experience. Guido has long and loud talks with his son while everyone else in the room is exhausted or trying to sleep, where he's going on and on about the rules of the game. Wouldn't any of the others yell at him for kind of commandeering the scenario and putting a happy face on it just for the benefit of one child, when none of the other children got a similar amount of energy invested toward blinding them to the horrors in front of them? Even if it's the most parental instinct in the world, would all the others be so eager to "play along," as it were?

Then there's the part of it where Guido somehow seems to have free rein of the camp, without consequences. There's the part that's reminiscent of The Shawshank Redemption, where Guido gets control of a loudspeaker and a record player -- or are those even two separate scenes? -- and gets to send an extended message/music to Principessa before he is stopped. In Shawshank, Andy gets a month in the hole for that transgression. But in a concentration camp, where they could just kill the offender without any repercussions, Guido seems to get away with it for a very long time, and is either never discovered, or not punished if he is.

Complaints aside, I ultimately do still feel fondly toward Life is Beautiful. I guess the biggest comparison to Jojo is that both movies involves a director known for comedy making a successful transition into something more serious. I think Taika Waititi's venture is ultimately more successful, but I think he also had less far to go than Benigni.

One more who had a good year

Each year in my year-end wrap-up post, when I honor "three who had a good year" and dishonor "three who had a bad year," it always feels a bit limiting that I'm forced to discuss primarily actors and actresses. That's because I'm trying to establish a trend of greatness or lack thereof, not just honor a single work that is either a feather in someone's cap or an embarrassment. Typically, significant creative types other than actors and actresses don't have more than a single work in a year, and I'm not digging deep here to let you know which key grip gripped it the best. Or, I suppose, the worst.

So I was a bit disappointed to realize Sunday night that I missed an obvious candidate for 2019, who would have broken me out of my restriction to only those appearing in front of the camera. He did appear in front of the camera, but he also appeared behind, and both were films I really loved.

I am speaking of comedian Stephen Merchant, who made his solo directorial debut in 2019 with Fighting With My Family, my #28 film of the year. (He directed a film I've never heard of in 2010 called Cemetery Junction, but that was co-directed with long-time collaborator Ricky Gervais.) He also appeared in front of the camera in a small but crucial role in Jojo Rabbit, which rounded out my top ten. For good measure, I only just noticed he was also in a small role in Good Boys (#45), which I wouldn't have been able to produce from memory but which I think I can now remember as a selling point for that film as well. Since I'm a little foggier on that one, this will be its only mention.

That's three 2019 feathers in one cap, so I thought it was finally time to give Stephen Merchant his due.

I watched Fighting With My Family again on Sunday night, as this year's second entry in an informal series I think of as "Showing My Wife a Film I Loved from the Previous Year." The first was Midsommar on New Year's Eve. Both have been comparative deep cuts, as both films landed in my 20s from last year. I'm sure the really heavy hitters will be on their way. (Both films also feature Florence Pugh, but that has to be a coincidence ... right? Winky emoticon.)

It took this second viewing for me to notice Merchant's sterling year. He's in this movie, as well, playing the father of the girlfriend of the main character's brother (whew) in two scenes. When I first saw the movie, I thought Merchant's scenes, the longer of which is near the start, were too broad by half, making me worried about the prospects of the film on the whole. I didn't find that to be the case this time, which I suppose could just be because I now know how much I like the movie. But maybe I was predisposed to be too hard on Merchant, and I'll tell you why that might be.

I've been really wearied by Stephen Merchant for a number of years now. Coming on the scene as the creative partner of Gervais, he was of course in my good graces straight away. But his on-screen persona became a tiresome shtick more quickly than I thought it might, to the point that seeing Merchant appear in a film or TV show was a sure sign for my brain to prepare my eyes to roll. Such lowlights included Movie 43, I Give it a Year and Table 19. I truly thought Merchant had shown us everything he had to offer, and it was just more downhill from here. (And my new perspective on him was such that I ignored his work in films I liked, like Hall Pass and Logan.)

Then at the start of 2019 he started to win me back into his good graces by surprising me. Not only did I find it unlikely for Merchant to direct a feature film, I found it particularly unlikely for him to direct a feature film about professional wrestling. It would be like Wes Craven directing a film about people who play the violin. (Wait, that actually happened.)

The surprises continued -- he was great at it. Watching it a second time on Sunday reminded me not only how he gets just the right performances from all -- literally, all -- of his actors, but how he's clever with the camera too. I marveled at one shot where the camera has to cross a ring of wrestlers and into an office set in one unbroken take, and how the set would have had to be constructed just so to allow that to happen. Then I noticed a great use of rack focus late in the movie. In one shot, it crystallized the main character's resolve not to quit -- without any words, just changes of focus on the three different planes of the mis en scene. There isn't a wasted shot in this film, nor one set up incorrectly. You could credit the DP with that, but the director tells the DP how he or she sees it all playing out.

The surprises continued to continue late in the year with Jojo Rabbit. Not only was his role as an officer in the Nazi secret police not his usual shtick, it was pretty much the exact opposite. There's some use of his gifts (albeit slightly withered lately) for comic timing in the performance, but this is not a comedic role in the slightest. He exudes a menace I never thought was possible from the man, as his eyes shoot daggers even as his face grins. He's solely responsible for the enormous amount of tension that builds in his scene. There's a weird physicality to Merchant's gangliness, but I've never before seen it purposed to its best possible usage in terms of discomfiting us. He reminded me a bit of one of those creepy tall men in Dark City.

At this point, I can't decide what I'm looking forward to more, Merchant's next trip behind the camera or his next trip in front of it.

That's a year worth honoring indeed.

Jojo haters oughtta watch this

Probably more than half the people who dislike/hate Jojo Rabbit do so because they think it's simplistic, or it reminds them of Wes Anderson too much, or they think it's schmaltzy. They're wrong, but this post cannot help convince those people otherwise.

It can, however, possibly speak to the people who find it offensive that a film would choose to make Hitler a figure of fun in the larger mission of promoting vigilance against the rise of fascism, something to which we may yet be susceptible today if we aren't careful. And the film I'm going to talk about today goes way, way further than Jojo both in making Hitler a figure of fun, and in pointing a finger at us for our own enduring worst tendencies as human beings.

That film is the 2015 German language film Look Who's Back, directed by David Wnendt (Wetlands), and to give some indication how few English speakers may have seen this movie, I could not even find a poster for it in English. It is available on Netflix, though, at least here in Australia, which is where I watched it on Saturday night. More people need to put this biting satire on their viewing schedules.

Some minor plot spoilers in the discussion to follow, but mostly in terms of the setup and not the payoff.

The German title literally translates to He's Here Again, though you can probably see why the other title is a bit catchier. Though, the title Look Who's Back does alternately remind me of Look Who's Talking and of the opening lines of Eminem's song "Without Me" ("Guess who's back/Back again/Shady's back/Tell a friend."). It's an adaptation of a 2012 book of the same name by German author Timur Vermes.

What this book/movie posits is that Adolf Hitler wakes up one morning in modern-day Germany, having mysteriously materialized in the courtyard of a random Munich apartment building. Dusting himself off and trying to get his bearings, he figures he must have gone into some kind of coma when he tried to kill himself back in 1945, though he doesn't have any explanation for why he hasn't aged or why he ended up in this particular spot.

He soon learns that Germany did not win the war and that many countries he assumed would no longer exist -- most embarrassingly to him, Poland -- are still alive and kicking and maybe even thriving. Ever the committed ideologue, he's still got an uncompleted mission and goes about trying to complete it, but now with the tools of television and the internet at his disposal.

The others he encounters are astonished by the extent of his physical similarity to Hitler and by his commitment to what can only be a performance art piece. His unwillingness to break character only further convinces them of the genius of the art. Of course, they can't conclude that this is the actual Adolf Hitler, as he obviously died, and even if he did not die, he'd be 125 years old.

Although some are offended, most seem to embrace this note-perfect incarnation of Hitler, who spouts the same hateful speech the "real" Hitler spouted, only a bit more shrewdly at first, after taking the temperature of modern political discourse. In fact, most people's very first instinct is, tellingly, to laugh, an indication that there is something inherently absurd about a straight-faced, modern-day presentation of Hitler as he was back then. And that it strikes them more as absurd and hilarious than it strikes them as offensive.

They embrace him not because they agree with his dog whistle hate speech, at least not publicly, but because they interpret it as some kind of post-modern statement whose exact meaning may elude them, but which is an important bit of commentary nonetheless. (One person who sees through it all says critics are afraid of missing the "dramatic ambiguity," which is a great and accurate comment on a common critical anxiety that we're not deep enough to comprehend a particular piece of art.)

So Hitler, who fascinates and astonishes everyone he meets, becomes this kind of minor celebrity on a popular talk show hosted by a comedian, and things snowball from there. The thing is, he's not just an entertaining novelty act -- it turns out he is able to latch on to a popular public sentiment that immigrants are taking over the country. In the 2010s, Germany indeed welcomed asylum seekers with apparently open arms like no other country, in a continued attempt to atone for the heinous acts of the Third Reich. However, these are still, on some level, the same citizens who were complicit in the rise of Nazism, if only because they didn't do anything to stop it. When asked by a reporter touring the country with Hitler, who is the story's main character, these citizens secretly commiserate the fact that they can say nothing now about these immigrants because of the past stigma against them. However, just like the native population of almost any country in the world, they are threatened by the way the face of their population is changing. Now, "Adolf Hitler" -- who is actually Adolf Hitler -- has given them the voice they need to actually state those feelings aloud.

A measure of how much I liked this film is how much it reminded me of other films I really like. One of those is Spike Lee's Bamboozled, in which an extremely wrong-headed impulse (to revive the use of blackface on television) becomes a national sensation when it starts thriving on a comedy TV show. To cement the connections, in this film, the comedian who hosts the show that hosts Hitler even puts on blackface to impersonate Barack Obama -- and it doesn't even get commented on. Also like Bamboozled, Look Who's Back goes behind the scenes of the TV show and considers how ratings prompt various principled people to sell out those principles. Both films consider how something truly disturbing is starting to come up from the collective subconscious, which in certain ways seems to be an embrace of diversity but is actually something quite pernicious instead. There's a funny bit in Look Who's Back about how Hitler hears modern hip hop on the radio and learns that "nigga" has come to be a term of affection. Of course, the person who explains this to him does not also explain the context in which it is meant to be used, and who gets to use it, making another connection to Bamboozled's exploration of the way white people try to appropriate black culture.

It also reminded me of a more obviously similar movie, but not necessarily similar in the ways you would expect. Both Look Who's Back and Mel Brooks' The Producers "make light" of Hitler in trying to make a larger point, though The Producers stays more in the realm of comedy while this film certainly has bigger things on its mind. But the real similarity is that both movies feature one or more characters who use Hitler-related content for the purpose of sabotaging someone or something for their own personal gain. While the producers are sure that Springtime for Hitler will flop, leading to the loss of investments from multiple investors (and the lining of their own pockets as a result), this film features a TV executive who was passed over for the top job, trying to torpedo the woman who got it by having her greenlight this obviously offensive material. Both projects become hits, causing the schemes to backfire.

Then there's a movie like Chris Morris' Four Lions, one of the films I considered for my best of last decade. That and Look Who's Back both share a handheld, documentary-style aesthetic, though I don't think any of Four Lions is meant to be faux documentary footage (unlike Look Who's Back, which does have some). They both involve the use of dangerous subject matter -- Islamic terrorism in that case -- for the purposes of what is sometimes quite funny comedy. Unlike The Producers, though, Four Lions has that same more serious agenda on its mind, as well as an agenda to see its characters as human beings -- something it does not share, you'll be glad to know, with Look Who's Back's perspective on Hitler.

But what I really want to communicate today is its similarities to Jojo Rabbit, especially since Look Who's Back came out such a comparatively short time before it. I can't imagine that those who feel offended by Taika Waititi's satirical risks will be any less offended by Look Who's Back, and may be more so. But at the very least, it should show them that Waititi is not doing something that was not already in the culture, and not already considered, by many, a valid way to repurpose Hitler for positive ends. In fact, there's a montage in Look Who's Back in which Hitler watches various real-world representations of himself on screen over the years since he killed himself (such as 2005's Downfall), some of which I could not immediately identify, but which were obviously comedies as well. Making a comic fool out of Hitler is not new to Jojo Rabbit, and it should not be getting the heat for it, particularly since Waititi's anti-fascist message is really as clear as day. It might be said that Look Who's Back is even more radical, as it does not confine its observations to World War II and let us extrapolate its messages to today. It instead states that this is still a really, really big problem today, and that the director's own presumably beloved fellow countrymen and women are a prime example of it.

In a way I'm surprised that Look Who's Back came out in 2015 rather than in the years since Trump was elected, as it really seems prescient in terms of its worries about the rise of new fascist leaders, be they Trump or Boris Johnson or Scott Morrison here in Australia. Okay, it may be going a bit far to call these men fascists, but only a bit. It's terrifying the way today's encoded hate speech has connected to an audience that was obviously waiting for it. And both the book's author and the film's director didn't even need to look outside Germany at the English-speaking countries listed above, because they were seeing enough of these disturbing trends in their own country. Which has been trying for 75 years now to rehabilitate its image, but continues to be undercut by a not-small-enough minority of people, who really do want Hitler to come back.