Rising Sun Media
The title of Raising Hitler is exactly as long as the pitch. Everything you need to know—maybe everything you want to know—is right there in the name.
Which is handy, because behind-the-scenes information about the movie is scant: it has zero Rotten Tomatoes reviews and a one-line description on IMDb.
My best guess is that somebody watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and dared to ask, “If they’ve got a time machine, why don’t they kill Hitler?”
Yes: it’s a stoner comedy about the Holocaust.
Two Jewish college kids get baked—their joke, not mine—and take a time machine back to Austria circa 1900 to kill ten-year-old Hitler.
Then they start to feel sorry for the kid. He’s kind of a sulky brat but his dad beats him, his mom has impossible expectations of him, and he’s not that bad of an artist. So they decide to take young Adolf back with them to 2016 and raise him to be nice.
And that’s… kind of it. Except that Raising Hitler wasn’t supposed to be a one-gag movie. It was actually meant to be part of a revolution in film.
You may remember Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s failed $1.75 billion bet that the future of movies was ten-minute videos that people would watch on their smartphones. It took Quibi all of seven months to burn through all that cash and die.
But before Quibi there was Blackpills, the French studio behind Raising Hitler. As with old movie serials, Blackpills features would play across weekly installments—an approach that depended on plots requiring zero explanation if you stumbled into the series halfway through or had a chemically impaired short-term memory.
Sounds like a job for Raising Hitler, which clocks in at exactly eight segments, eight minutes each. You can burn one in as much time as it takes to watch an episode, which is something our time travelers do frequently. And which may have been Blackpills’s whole marketing strategy.
The time machine, built by the brains of the outfit, Jesse (Lucas Englander), is basically a kitbashed refrigerator: either an homage to Bill and Ted’s phone both or the original Back to the Future concept. His buddy Mickey (Ziad El May) is tired of listening to his parents lecture him about concentration camps every time he comes by to borrow money. So he figures if they go back and kill ten-year-old Hitler, maybe his folks will lighten up. This is as far as the movie delves into generational trauma.
Well, not entirely. There’s a couple of Butterfly Effect riffs where it turns out that lifting Hitler out of European history just makes everything worse.
This is the truly weird part.
As awful as Raising Hitler is, buried somewhere in this shitpile of a movie are philosophical questions that serious historians have grappled with for decades. Was Hitler’s evil bred in the bone, or could he have been “saved” with better parenting? Would World War II and the Holocaust have happened without him?
I want to be clear that in no way do director Louis Farge or writer Ofer Seker take on these weighty issues. They don’t even tackle their own concept: for most of the film, our heroes are too busy looking for their time machine to do much Hitler-raising.
But there being no other reason to investigate this movie—even to trash it—I’m going to pretend for the sake of this review that the filmmakers are actually trying to make a point.
Could Hitler have been redeemed with better parenting?
It’s a less silly hypothetical than it sounds. History being unrepeatable, it’s less about whether that psychopath could have been saved than preventing the next generation of Hitlers from rising up. Can you teach kids to hate or not to hate? A subplot of Raising Hitler briefly touches on this question, as Jesse’s favorite philosopher—an Austrian anti-Nazi—is turned into an even bigger mass murderer than Hitler because Jewish Jesse threatened his younger self with a very anachronistic Luger.
This plot turn seems to suggest that World War II and the Holocaust were going to happen anyway, and it just happened to be Hitler who fulfilled an historical inevitability triggered by Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I and two thousand years of antisemitism. Doctorates have been awarded on this topic.
There’s even a third ethical quandary bouncing breezily across the story: whether empathy is always the correct response. Feeling sorry for young Adolf is where the trouble starts.
But just because we might be asking these questions doesn’t mean the movie is trying to answer them. Raising Hitler is not Jojo Rabbit. It’s not even Heil Honey I’m Home, the infamous British sitcom that treated Adolf and Eva like Ricky and Lucy and got cancelled halfway through its pilot episode. We’re not using Hitler as a lens for satire. Mickey wants to prevent the Holocaust so his parents will stop guilting him out.
Screenwriter Eker is not only Jewish but Israeli. His script could be thumbing his nose at first- and second-generation survivors who burden their descendants under the weight of history. Whether that’s a legitimate subject for discussion among Jews or Israelis is not for me to say. Whether it gives Eker license to make Holocaust jokes is less up for debate.
Mel Brooks once made a cogent argument for Hitler jokes: as a living man, Hitler forbade people to laugh at him, so the greatest revenge we can take on him is to make him ridiculous in death. This is how we got classics like “Springtime for Hitler” and “Hitler on Ice.”
But there’s a corollary to Brooks’s rule, which is to keep Hitler’s victims out of it. You can laugh about the mustache; you can’t laugh about Treblinka. Raising Hitler asks us to do both. At one point, young Adolf gets a smudge of soot under his nose and decides it looks good on him. Later, when Mickey lights up a joint, the boy says he “likes the smell of the gas.”
To say that Raising Hitler is a failed film implies that it was going for something that might have been worth succeeding at. Which, as far as I can tell, is to get us to see Hitler as a Teutonic Dennis the Menace. There are moments in the film where they really do go for the lump in the throat. Aw, see, he’s not so bad! So they want the shock value of the title and they want us to like that little scamp Adolf.
This isn’t to say that stoner comedies can’t deal with taboo subjects. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle works because its characters are harmless potheads crossing a minefield of xenophobia. Too often, though—as in Raising Hitler—the genre is about inoculating the characters against any charges that the writers are just being cruel or offensive for a laugh. How can you hate on these guys when they’re too wasted to know what they’re even saying?
But as they say, if you’re gonna shoot at the king, you better kill the king. If you really want to raise the nature-vs.-nurture debate about Hitler, you better stick the landing. Rick and Morty did it better with “Raising Gazorpazorp,” where Morty sires a child by an inherently violent race and tries to teach him kindness, only to wind up getting tarred as an abusive parent in his alien kid’s tell-all book.
Okay, those titles are very similar. And “Raising Gazorpazorp” aired three years before Raising Hitler. This movie may be even more of a hack job than I thought.
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