Thomasin McKenzie – Memphis Flyer

There’s no such thing as “the good ole days.” The past was just as full of horrors as the present. You just forgot how bad it was, or nobody wrote the bad parts down — or maybe you just didn’t read the people who wrote the bad parts down.

That’s the ultimate theme of Edgar Wright’s new thriller, Last Night in Soho. It’s definitely a case of an artist trying to have their cake and eat it, too. Wright both luxuriates in nostalgia, and undercuts it at the same time. For an unapologetic popster like Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Baby Driver, examining the dark side of his obsessions has led to the deepest work of his career. And he got there without sacrificing any of the visceral thrills he’s so good at delivering.

Thomasin McKenzie as Eloise (Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh / Focus Features)

The film’s object of nostalgia is swinging London of the 1960s. That’s the scene that gestated The Beatles and The Who, but Wright’s attention is on the slick pop of Dusty Springfield and Sandy Shaw. That’s the music Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) is listening to in the film’s opening sequence as she dances in a dress made of newspaper. Wright immediately reveals the essentials of her character by whipping his camera around her room. She wants to be a fashion designer, she lives in a small town, where her ’60s obsession marks her as a girl out of time, and her mother is a ghost.

About that last bit. Ellie has visions, often of dead people, and Ellie’s grandma (Rita Tushingham) reveals that her mother did, too, and these visions eventually became so disturbing and uncontrollable that Ellie’s mom killed herself. When Ellie is accepted into the London College of Fashion, grandma is supportive, but warns that if life in the big city becomes too overwhelming, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Her idealized version of London is dispelled immediately, as her cab driver taking her from the train station to her dorm creeps on her. Things get worse when meets her roommate Jocasta (Synnove Karlsen), a coke-snorting mean girl who calls herself “Hurricane Jocasta.” These living arrangements aren’t tenable for the studious, and somewhat mentally fragile Ellie, so she finds a cheap room in a boarding house run by Miss Collins (Diana Rigg, in her final role). In order to pay for it, and clothes from the fashionable West End shops that surround the college, she gets a job in a dive bar called The Toucan, where she serves drinks to an old barfly (Terence Stamp) who takes an interest in her.

Matt Smith, a former Doctor Who, as Jack

Ellie does get more sleep in the new room, but that sleep comes with vivid dreams of the West End in the mid-’60s featuring a girl named Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy), an aspiring singer who falls for Jack (Matt Smith), a manager with an eye for new talent. The beautiful, confident Sandy represents an ideal self for the mousy small-town girl, and when Ellie dyes her hair blonde like Sandy’s, boys start to notice her. But Ellie’s dreams take a dark turn as Sandy falls deeper into the seedy side of London. The 1960s produced great music and fashion, but it was a man’s world. Young women like Sandy put up with brutal misogyny, even from men who professed to love them. The mystery of Sandy’s fate starts to weigh on Ellie, as her visions invade her waking life.

Wright is inspired by stylish English films of the period by directors like Nicholas Roeg, but the screenplay, co-written with Penny Dreadful scribe Krysty Wilson-Cairns, critiques the material it celebrates. It’s the director’s first film with a female protagonist (although he has created many memorable women, such as Ramona Flowers), and the change in perspective seems to have invigorated his imagination. The cast is aces, including veterans like Rigg and Stamps and the brilliantly paired co-leads of Taylor-Joy and McKenzie.

Anya Taylor-Joy and Thomasin McKenzie make out with Doctor Who.

Wright’s one of contemporary cinema’s most inventive visual stylists, and this film is a feast of in-camera effects and plain old misdirection. While in the visions of the past, Ellie and Sandy can only see each other in mirrors, even as their identities are merging, Persona-style. This presents endless opportunities for Wright to pull some boffo visual gags. But even as the director is emptying his trick bag all over the screen, the story keeps humming along at a brisk pace. This helps later in the film, when it gets harder to keep all the plot plates spinning. Last Night in Soho is a pop confection that’s not just empty calories. Don’t miss this opportunity to see a master like Wright at the top of his game.

Is it just me, or has real life started to seem a lot like The Producers? In Mel Brooks’ classic directorial debut, two Broadway producers set out to bilk investors by coming up with a scheme that would pay off for them, even if they had a flop. So they hire a hopelessly inept playwright, who happens to be a Nazi, to write a musical called Springtime for Hitler. But the play turns out to be so bad it’s good, and the producers are hoisted by their own petard when it actually makes money. They lose by “succeeding.”

Likewise, it’s arguable that Donald Trump never really wanted to be president. His campaign was a long-form grift. Once he lost — which, since he was a hopelessly inept candidate, was surely inevitable — he would start his own conservative TV network and get on with his real passion, which is being a jerk on television. But to the surprise of everyone, Trump included, he won — and may yet lose by “succeeding.”

Roman Griffin Davis, Taika Waitit, and Scarlett Johansson

The resurgence of racist, nationalist authoritarianism that accompanied Trump’s 2016 campaign has produced a lot of new art in response. Fascists famously hate art: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ that’s when I reach for my revolver,” goes the famous quote. That those words came from the pen of Nazi playwright Hanns Johst from a play originally performed for Hitler’s birthday the year he took power is another in the long string of ironies associated with the Nazis. Fascists don’t do self-reflection very well — probably because of what honest self-reflection would reveal. The best way to disarm a fascist leader is to make him look ridiculous. Charlie Chaplin knew that in September 1939, when he started filming The Great Dictator the same month the Nazis kicked off World War II by invading Poland.

The Little Tramp’s expert skewering of Hitler is a big part of the DNA of Jojo Rabbit. New Zealand director Taika Waititi brought some much-needed humor to the MCU with the wildly successful Thor: Ragnarok, and if you haven’t seen Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows, you’re missing out on two of the best comedies of the era. Like Chaplin, Waititi’s comedy is all about empathy. The rural weirdos of Wilderpeople and the uptight vampires of Shadows are both quirky outsiders whose misadventures are played for laughs, but the communities of choice they create for themselves where their weirdness can flourish are Waititi’s preferred model for society. It’s natural that the director would take on fascism, where the only communities that matter — race and nationality — are those you can’t choose.

Taika Waititi (left) and Roman Griffin Davis skewer fascism in Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit.

Making fun of Nazis by directly portraying Hitler onscreen is making comedy with the difficulty level turned up to maximum. There probably aren’t five people in the whole world who could pull it off in our fraught moment, but Waititi is up to the challenge. His secret weapon is 10-year-old Roman Griffin Davis, who plays Jojo Betzler, a young boy living with his mother Rosie (an absolutely brilliant Scarlett Johansson) in 1945 Berlin. His father disappeared into the war, and his sister died on the home front, so his relationship with his mother is very close. Like most young boys, he is impressed by uniforms and the masculine camaraderie of soldiers, so he is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth — so enthusiastic, in fact, that his imaginary friend is actually Hitler. Like Chaplin, Waititi plays the dictator himself, and it is a hell of a performance. Since this is not actually supposed to be Hitler, but rather a 10-year-old boy’s projection of the Führer, his movements mirror Jojo’s hapless awkwardness. Making the fascist leader an imaginary father figure is a stroke of comedic genius, as it echoes the real psychological dynamics within authoritarian movements. Fascists want to be seen as fearsome warrior types because otherwise they just look like buffoons, and nobody wants to follow a buffoon. Sure enough, the highest-ranking real-life Nazi in Jojo Rabbit, Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell) is a drunken, disgraced Wehrmacht officer who ended up commanding a summer camp because of his role in “Operation Screwup.”

The road to hate runs through seeing people as abstractions, and the cure for hate is meeting the real people behind the stereotypes. When Jojo, the good German boy, discovers his mother has been hiding Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), a Jewish girl, in their attic, he is faced with her undeniable humanity. His attempts to interrogate her to learn the evil secrets of his race enemies only leads him to the inevitable conclusion that she’s not the evil one in this picture. But as he starts to doubt his poorly formed convictions, his imaginary Führer grows more strident. By his final scene, Waititi is not funny anymore. He’s scary and inhumanly angry in the way of the demagogue, forcing young Jojo to finally choose between humanity and barbarity. It is the same choice that we all now face.

Jojo Rabbit