Taika Waititi's films analysed by a hater from New Zealand
Most people outside New Zealand (and sometimes inside it) think our only two film directors are Peter Jackson and Taika Waititi. Jackson, now a billionaire, hasn't made any lastingly popular films since Lord of the Rings, and damaged his cultural goodwill among New Zealand progressives by fucking up our labour laws to make no more than The Hobbit. Waititi, however, is our golden boy; good-looking, charismatic, allegedly funny and talented.
Most importantly, Waititi is internationally beloved. New Zealand is the kind of country where one of our Prime Ministers will go on TV to do an unwatchable bid for tourism, and a bored David Letterman will somehow come across as the more powerful person. Before our initial Covid response made world news, any celebrity could get a headline here just by mentioning New Zealand. Our Tall Poppy Syndrome collapses when it comes to our few international celebrities, who we're expected to throw all our support behind because come on, they're all we've got!
However, an undercurrent of New Zealanders hate Taika Waititi's work, a hatred worsened by these expectations to love it. Similar feelings exist in pockets of the queer community in response to his HBO series Our Flag Means Death; a show that has some good queer representation but makes one feel somewhat demographically marketed to while watching it. Nevertheless, New Zealanders got here first, and there are dozens of us who must be heard.
Mainstream Waititi feelings could go either way this year; Next Goal Wins looks like his pre-Marvel fare, while his upcoming live-action Hollywood adaptation of the masterpiece Akira is a clear abomination. But whatever artistic sins he commits in future, many people will still insist he was good before he got rich and joined the MCU. However, I know that the Emperor has never had any delightfully quirky clothes. I watched six of his seven feature films (leaving out Thor: Love and Thunder) so I could write this article, and the same annoying features crop up across all of them.
Therefore, it's time to take down Waititi's films from the inside, and get dogpiled to fuck by my countrymen.
The jokes
You have to live in New Zealand to get why Waititi and his colleagues have overshadowed our comedy from the late 2000s onwards. Some of it's just the result of an underfunded film and TV industry that prioritises the same group of people and their friends; the industry that awarded Waititi the 48-hour Film Festival prize in 2004 mostly because of his Academy Award recognition in 2003. Picture New Zealand's cinematic scene as the circle jerk of English stars shrunk down to a 20th of its size.
While nepotism explains much of our industry, as it does everywhere, broader cultural factors explain Waititi's particular success. New Zealand's small population, geographic isolation and limited professional opportunities put some specific risks on rocking the boat. Here, if you act like a bastard and blow up your own or someone else's life, there's a good chance the fallout will follow you around even if you change scenes or move towns. In another world this difficult situation might get people to deal with conflict upfront and assertively, or make the whisper networks give out better consequences to abusers. However, this is a colonial country with colonial values, and an English-style emotional repression most of us haven't yet shaken off. As a result, New Zealand culture is one of passive aggression, confrontation avoidance and an inability to back ourselves.
All these factors make it difficult for us to aggressively hassle each other, which a lot of good comedy requires. How can you easily experiment with being abrasive and weird when you know you're in line for an "oh shit, my new landlord is also my enemy's best friend's wife" revelation at some point, and the only way out is a 3-hour flight away? Without the freedom to be a blatant arsehole, many New Zealand comedy writers either turn inwards to awkward self-deprecation or do deadpan comedy. The latter tends to work a bit better, in the stylings of John Clarke or the whole country trying to convince Americans that gardens are illegal in New Zealand. But although there are many ways to do awkward jokes, popular New Zealand comedy usually creates awkwardness not via people being outrageously awful, as in I Think You Should Leave or Curb Your Enthusiasm, but in a character's halting insecurity or obliviousness. Our much-discussed 'understated' comedy is mostly us being—often quite justifiably—afraid to cut loose.
In the 21st century, many of these comedies are professionally connected to Waititi one way or another, though ones like Wellington Paranormal or The Breaker Upperers are generally funnier than his work. But what's annoying about Waititi's own comedy is how self-impressed it is, how reliant on a low threshold for wacky incongruity and a comfort with a deathly slow pace of jokes. What We Do In The Shadows is moderately funny, but it's still essentially "what if vampires were just some guys who lived in a flat?" extended into a feature. If that premise doesn't work for you, delving into its particularities (they argue about chores! you can't see them in a mirror!) will only be wearing. In Jojo Rabbit, if you don't find it hilarious to watch Waititi running along with Jojo in the woods, you have to wait for about half a minute for it to stop. I'm not even sure where half the jokes are in Boy, an okay dramatic piece that was described as "falling-down funny" by critics.
I can hear people objecting that humour is subjective, but that's the point. It's not going to kill anyone to point out that Waititi isn't funny.
Mini-adults and overgrown children
Waititi has a habit of writing children as adults and adults as children. This wasn't always the case; in one of his only good films, the short Two Cars, One Night, the children's dialogue is realistic and mostly sweet without being cloying. Boy includes one of Waititi's most insightful lines when, angrily throwing off his father's hold on him, Boy says "I thought I was like you, but I'm not. I don't have any potential." It captures how children will make important statements but use words without quite catching their meaning.
By Hunt for the Wilderpeople, this insight is gone. We meet Ricky as a 12-year-old foster child with a long record of property destruction, and for the first few minutes of the film he appears uneasy and reserved. However, after a few moments of slight kindness from his foster aunt Bella, he is transformed into a plucky, quippy child who tells Sam Neill's character Hec to "process his emotions". Jojo Rabbit's Jojo oscillates between talking like a child and a 30-yr-old bartender, with the only continuity seeming like whatever line Waititi thought sounded funny or interesting.
Wilderpeople and Jojo are meant to be set from a child's perspective, but leave out children's terror. When the Nazis stop by Jojo's house, it's played only as mildly concerning. In reality, this experience would be terrifying not only because of the threat of state murder, but because most children are scared by adult interrogation in itself. In Wilderpeople, we see very few emotions from Ricky as Bella dies, as Hec tells him he's not wanted, as the army closes in on them, or as he is reunited with Hec after separation by the state. Instead, during a cheap knockoff of Thelma and Louise's desert chase, he remarks that "I didn't choose the skux life, the skux life chose me" as their car careens through a fence and flips over.
As for Waititi's adult characters, Rosie in Jojo is perhaps the only one who acts her age. In Wilderpeople, Hec is emotionally immature and made to grow up by Ricky. In Boy, Alamein is a charismatic but childish deadbeat incapable of being a proper father. Boy's longing for him makes the film work to an extent, but Alamein's one-note characterisation gives you little hope that their relationship won't break down, which makes the story more predictable and lessens the dramatic tension.
The worst offender by far is Eagle vs Shark. The film is meant to portray endearing social awkwardness, but feels like an uncanny valley body swap where every late-20s character both talks and acts like a 10-yr-old, right down to Lily's uncoordinated hula hooping. At dinner, Lily makes a joke—"What's the name of the Emperor of Farts? Gaseous Maximus"—and later says it's her favourite. What kind of adult is this? Why is she not being bullied even more, and how can I join in?
Waititi's reluctance to write mature adult characters is perhaps related to some of his personal issues around adulthood, if this Wired profile is anything to go by. But his latter-day treatment of child characters shows a lack of respect for children as individuals. They have become mere vectors for lines that Waititi thinks sound incongruously wise or eloquent coming out of children's mouths.
Fear of sincerity
When Waititi is doing straightforward comedy, it feels like a one-joke-at-a-time affair. But during serious scenes, there is a cavalcade of jokes banging on the door, insisting they be let back in. Waititi is generally uncomfortable with letting a film breathe and trusting the audience. This often manifests in over-explaining jokes or themes; Rosie can't just briefly imitate Jojo's father, it has to go on for 3 minutes.
However, he has the most trouble with sad or poignant scenes. Boy ends with a quiet moment in a graveyard, but immediately cuts to a post-credits dance number. Jojo manages a sad moment in Rosie's death, but later undercuts a slow-motion war scene via Sam Rockwell in a flamboyant outfit. Even in Thor: Ragnarok, as the characters are watching Asgard get destroyed, Waititi's character quips away about what's happening on screen. But the most repulsive scene is in Wilderpeople; Ricky's aunt Bella suddenly dies, and 20 seconds later Waititi makes a 'funny' cameo as a minister at her funeral delivering an inappropriate sermon. There is more time given to respect a character's death in this organist skit than there is in Wilderpeople.
I don't know why Waititi keeps ringing the doorbell of serious emotion only to run away, but after a while you can smell the fear underlying the films' comedic moments. Much of it comes from Waititi constantly trying to be the funniest guy in the improv class. Sit down and relax for a second, man. It's okay to be sad.
Safe politics
Waititi has undeniably broken some artistic ground in New Zealand specifically. In the midst of New Zealand’s cinema of unease tradition, shaping both Pākehā and Māori films, people have probably felt refreshed to see a Māori comedian become such an international household name. Some of Waititi's scenes—having John Campbell do a cameo in Wilderpeople, the Māori wave in his short film Tama Tu—capture something so New Zealand and/or so Māori that it’s obvious why people love seeing it on the big screen. Waititi's work also shows indigenous people just doing normal things, with scarcely any reference to whiteness or the misery of colonisation. This approach works fine in Two Cars, One Night and Boy, the American TV series Reservation Dogs (for which Waititi was an executive producer and wrote one episode), and probably in Next Goal Wins.
Wilderpeople’s scene where a Māori kid flips off a social worker during a car chase is probably the strongest political point Waititi has made on film. Yet it's rare that he writes any politically charged dialogue, and much of his work reveals attitudes that are decidedly mainstream. When he writes lines for children that sound strangely erudite, the corollary is that children aren't intelligent, hardly an unusual opinion. Jojo's Nazis come across as bumbling, ineffectual and not much of a threat—i.e. how most people treat them. Other critics have detailed Jojo's myriad political flaws, so I won't rehash their critiques, except to gape at the scene where the murder of a Nazi officer is played as a tragic moment.
There are plenty of ways to reduce the horror of atrocious institutions by mocking them, but this is hardly accomplished by using these institutions as backdrops for low-stakes saccharine romps. Wilderpeople tries to follow the ordinary-people poetics of Boy while also ridiculing the New Zealand state that kidnaps Māori children. But unlike in the tragic but funny The Florida Project, or Sleeping Dogs (Sam Neill's breakout film), the state in Wilderpeople carries almost none of the menace it has in real life. The social worker is alternately cartoonishly evil and a quirky buffoon; in one scene she's talking about exterminating Ricky on national TV, in another, she and Ricky argue over which Terminator character each of them is. The film's tone makes it clear that nothing lastingly bad will happen, even during the climactic scene, and by the end Ricky is landed with a nice enough foster family and no ongoing harm. A comedy that actually skewered Oranga Tamariki (formerly Child, Youth and Family Services) wouldn't have been nearly so popular among white liberals.
Pākehā love for Waititi is, of course, conditional on his playing nice. When he noted in an interview that New Zealand is "racist as fuck", the country had a meltdown. But for Waititi stans who think his films are dismantling colonisation or heteronormativity, I have to ask why they think Marvel, the dead-eyed military-funded juggernaut of cultural hegemony, commissioned him for two films. It's clear that Disney doesn't find him threatening, and picked his goofy aesthetic to make itself look more humane and self-aware. Bolstered by Marvel stans' tenacity for retconning MCU films as progressive, it has apparently worked.
I have long felt that Taika Waititi is New Zealand's Wes Anderson. Jojo was his most obvious homage to/ripoff of Anderson: the nostalgia, scout camp uniforms, tidy pastel architecture, symmetrical shots, classic rock songs, rounded square polaroid frames, mock fighting armed with household implements and a sense of childlike wonder, slightly sad-looking characters in portrait shots, awkward dancing, performative whimsy. Although fandoms are generally alienating as a way of consuming media—forgoing nuanced taste for blind allegiance to artists, building one's identity upon pieces of art and tying it to one's social marginalisation, bullying people who have negative or even ambivalent reactions to their fav—Anderson and Waititi fandoms are alienating in a specific way, because for people who don't find their films charming, both directors just come off as smug. In interviews, Waititi sometimes talks about how he didn't do any research for a film or show, improvises a lot, doesn't really know what he's doing and so on. The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) sentiment is "and I can still toss off masterpieces because I am a genius." In reality, his disorganisation and lack of effort really shows.
New Zealand has long played up Waititi’s talent because our cultural low self-esteem lowers the bar for what counts as good art. With so few film-making resources in this country, we have become grateful for New Zealand movies being made at all. Moreover, our nationwide conflict avoidance makes us prone to perceiving even mild pushback as harsh. Critiquing art in the 2020s is hard enough when dissing a popular artist might get you trashed on Twitter and destroy your byline, but this is arguably harder in New Zealand's tiny press and arts scenes than elsewhere. I suspect this is why our films that are sort of mid routinely get praised as stunning, raw, groundbreaking. There's just nothing in this culture to incentivise proper critique; much less to see it and its attendant conflict as something potentially useful for artistic growth.
We need to let Waititi go. Let him set up residence between the walls of a Disney set, replacing the cosmic horror of Akira with the terrestrial horror of a 3-hour “horseplay with Chris Hemsworth” reel, and do not mourn the loss. Together, we can rise above his Mild Fun brand of humour. Guy Williams' New Zealand Today is a good start, with decent comic timing and taking a few real social risks. But I'd love to see a full-blown New Zealand version of Eric Andre or Chris Morris, someone deeply surreal and nasty who will tell multiple jokes a minute and not give a shit whether you like them or not. Some comedy that doesn't make you feel warm and cuddly about New Zealand as a nation afterwards, that exposes the ugliness in this country and mocks it mercilessly. At least the Australians know how to properly call someone a cunt.
Ari Wilson is an activist and writer based in Aotearoa. To read more of their writing, visit https://medium.com/@swiftcamels