It isn’t rare to see a love-it-or-hate-it movie; every awards season brings one or two of them.
Last year we had “Green Book,” this year we have “Joker.” “Jojo Rabbit,” the movie that invites us to deplore the evil actions of the Nazis but adore the cuddly comedy of seeing them turned into over-the-top fops and fools, looks, at a glance, to have inspired a textbook case of love-it-or-hate-it divisiveness.
That was true from the moment the movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
It came in with an insane level of you-gotta-see-it, you-won’t-believe-it buzz; it left with a mixed bag of plaudits and pans, its path to awards victory now strewn with questions.
That felt like a far less uniformly ecstatic response than the executives at Fox Searchlight were expecting, or wanting.Yet as a movie goes out into the world, it generates its own forms of conversation — and publicity.
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