A good movie

Since I kept hearing some really good things about this flick, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, even though I did appreciate the original approach chosen by Taika Waititi, I’m afraid it was still too whimsical for my taste though. Still, there is no denying that Waititi was quite hilarious playing some kind of stupid childlike version of Adolf Hitler. However, I think it was a mistake to show all the Nazi characters as being some harmless morons. I mean, some of them were actually really smart and unfortunately not harmless at all. In general, it was probably the biggest issue with this movie, not the fact that it was a comedy (Roberto Begnini has displayed years ago with ‘La vita è bella’ that you can make a great comedy about the holocaust), but the fact it actually trivialized how dreadfully tragic this war was for pretty much everybody involved, even the Germans. In a similar fashion, it seemed fairly easy for a 10-year-old boy to keep a Jewish girl hidden in his house. Indeed, if you’re familiar with Anne Frank’s story, it was actually hard to swallow the fact that they kept running around in the house and scream at each other when people in this predicament actually had to remain completely silent for months. Of course, you could argue that this story was told from the point of view of a very young boy and while this approach definitely had some merit, it still didn’t completely work though. Indeed, the idea of showing the war from the point of view of a kid who basically had been completely brainwashed by the Nazi propaganda was actually quite fascinating but I wish they displayed him really struggling with conflicting ideas and feelings. Unfortunately, this process was greatly undermined by the fact that he started to change his mind way too fast and way too easily after only a few conversations with Elsa. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still a decent watch though and, because of its original approach, it does get a free extra points from me.