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KLARA AND THE SUN

Producers: David Heyman, Garrett Basch and Taika Waititi   Director: Taika Waititi    Screenplay: Taika Waititi and Dahvi Waller   Cast: Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams, Mia Tharia, Rachel House, Aran Murphy, Natasha Lyonne, Steve Buscemi, Jesse Griffin and Harry Greenwood   Distributor: Sony/Columbia Pictures

Grade: D

There are few things as depressing as when a movie’s desperate effort to be magical instead curdles into strained eccentricity.  That’s what happens in Taika Waititi’s wrongheaded adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel about an android who struggles to understand the human world into which she’s brought, particularly the fraught dynamic of the family that purchases her.

Jenna Ortega is Klara, a perky robot among the available products in a store overseen by a frazzled but not unsympathetic manager (a hammy Natasha Lyonne).  The robots, marketed as artificial friends to serve as consolation to customers in a dystopian post-World War III world, are unfortunately outdated, discontinued models, which explains why the store across the street, with its newer androids, is enjoying brisker sales. 

When Klara, a quirky thing who’s known for talking to the sun (an entity that, being solar powered, she considers her god), is given a rare chance to pose in the window, she catches the eye of teen Josie (Mia Tharia), who begs her mother Chrissie (Amy Adams) to purchase her.  This after Klara witnesses an embrace between two people that starts her musing on the nature of human love.

At the remote prairie house Chrissie and Josie share, Klara must learn to calibrate her interaction with the outside world, which in her case proves complicated.  Josie is terminally ill, the result, it seems, of going through an educational process called “lifting,” designed to increase a subject’s intellectual ability to genius level but liable to carry unintended physical side effects.  Chrissie and her gruff housemaid Melania (Rachel House) are understandably protective of the girl, especially since her older sister Sal died and her father abandoned the family.

Some of the plot involves Chrissie and Melania’s gradual, if grudging, acceptance of Klara (the nature of this is encapsulated in one clumsy allusion to a popular movie franchise when Klara’s told “you’re not the droid we’re looking for”).  But more is devoted to Klara’s halting accommodation to her new world, which involves interacting with the robot Scarecrow (Jesse Griffin) who guards the surrounding wheat fields and getting to know Rick (Aran Murphy), the “unlifted” neighbor boy who’s Josie’s best (indeed, only) friend; there’s also a subplot about Klara’s determination to destroy the hulking harvester whose black smoke obscures the sun (just as a street cleaners dd back in the city), which Klara is convinced has the power to cure Josie.   

Eventually, however, the focus shifts to Chrissie’s plan to secure Josie’s continued presence through the agency of a mysterious man (played archly by Steve Buscemi).  It wouldn’t be fair to reveal this twist too explicitly; suffice it to say that it bears some resemblance to the idea Hirokazu Kore-eda recently mused over in “Sheep in a Box.”

Nothing in “Klara and the Sun” manages to carry much emotional heft; its twee, mannered style undercuts any real involvement.  But one sequence stops the movie dead in its tracks, and it never recovers.  That’s when Chrissie invites a group of her daughter’s “lifted” classmates and their parents to Josie’s afternoon piano recital.  The collection of grotesques that attend—most notably two arrogant, abrasive (and apparently deformed) boys who ridicule embarrassed Rick for his supposed intellectual deficiency—makes for an ugly scene, and how Klara reacts is treated as shocking.  Yet there’s no follow-up; the sequence might as well never have happened at all.

Waititi and his crew—production designer Ra Vincent, costumer Mayes C. Rubeo, cinematographer Michael Berlucchi—work hard to bring a hauntingly luminous look to the visuals, but they succeed only in reemphasizing how synthetic everything is.  The brusque editing of Adam Gough and Tom Eagles adds to the shapeless feel, while Michael Giacchino ladles a syrupy score over it all.                     

Nor can the cast elevate the picture, though heaven knows they try.  Ortega embodies the wide-eyed innocence of Klara with a vengeance, but can’t summon the nuance that would make the robot a classic of its kind, and Adams’ clipped, chilly delivery leaves us unmoved by Chrissie’s grief.  Better are Tharia, who makes Josie’s mood swings understandable and even touching, and Murphy, whose underplaying is a welcome relief in comparison to the frantic work of someone like Griffin, whose efforts to be lovable are exhausting, and most of the supporting cast (like Klara’s fellow robots in Lyonne’s shop, whose stiff movements and dry delivery are meant to be amusing but fall flat).

“Klara and the Sun” is just aching to come across as a touching, meaningful fable about the fragility of the human condition, but Waititi’s comic sensibility is at odds with the material, and the combination is ultimately both overly broad and cloying.  That’s a pity, since Ishiguro’s book had potential in the right hands.

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MUSK

Producers: Zhang Xin, Joey Marra, Nick Shumaker, Jessica Grimshaw, Dana O’Keefe, Ronan Farrow, Lawrence Wright, Jessie Deeter, Erin Edeiken and Alex Gibney   Director: Ales Gibney   Screenplay: Alex Gibney and Michael J. Palmer   Cast: Elon Musk, Justine Musk, Ashley St. Clair, Kara Swisher, Martin Eberhard, Zoë Schiffer, Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Harris, Errol Musk, Samantha Power, Cory Doctorow, Reid Hoffman and Katie Drummond   Distributor: Bleecker Street

Grade: B

At the start of his four-hour documentary, Alex Gibney, serving as narrator of what is basically a massive cinematic essay on Elon Musk, discusses his initial misgivings about doing a piece about the much-covered trillionaire at all and then, after being persuaded to proceed with the project, trying to contact Musk for interviews.  Elon, he says, reportedly referred to the documentarian as a “douche” and said any film coming from him would be a “hit piece.”

Well, if that wasn’t his opinion before, it will certainly be so now.  “Musk” is a deeply critical examination of the man, admiring to a degree of his ambition and drive but otherwise very unflattering.  In large measure, however, that’s Mask’s fault.  Not only did he refuse to participate himself, but prevented others who might have provided positive assessments from doing so.  (Still, that might have been the wiser course.  When footage of his father Errol talking about his son’s unhappy childhood is inserted, it’s likely to make one queasy rather than sympathetic.)

As a result, Musk’s initial involvement in Tesla is basically recounted through the testimony of Martin Eberhard, the co-founder and initial CEO of the company whom Musk forced out.  And his personal life is treated not just through the reminiscences of his father but those of two women whose experiences can hardly be described as happy—his ex-wife Justine and Ashley St. Clair, the estranged mother of one of his many children.  (Musk’s apparent desire to ensure the passage of his purportedly superior genes to future generations is one of the many curious plot elements.)

Add to that Gibney’s inclusion of much archival footage and clips from interviews with colleagues, journalists and experts regarding his business practices, personal habits and often extreme views that cumulatively paint a very dark portrait.  As befits its prodigious length (four hours, with a ten-minute intermission), the coverage is broad: in addition to Tesla, Space-X and the social-media platform once known as Twitter and now called X are treated in detail, emphasizing the governmental financing of the former and Musk’s remaking of the latter, with its transformation into a virtual market for right-wing expression.

That perspective is reinforced when the film turns to Musk’s forays into Republican politics in the 2024 elections and his involvement in the second Trump administration via the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, whose activities are treated with a combination of astonishment and disdain.

Admirers of Musk, and there are many, will undoubtedly denounce Gibney’s documentary in terms even more aggressive than his own.  But though its point of view is made abundantly clear, Musk’s attempts to suppress its making (St. Clair was reportedly offered tens of millions not to participate in it), as well as his refusal to appear in it himself, except in archival form, can only deepen one’s confidence in its factual accuracy, although one could reasonably note that the language used to characterize some of his actions smacks of purple prose.  But then Musk doesn’t pull any punches in his X postings, so why should others pussyfoot around expressing their criticism of him?

On a purely technical level, “Musk” is conventionally made, an assemblage of the usual sorts of material one would expect in such a profile.  The cinematography by Benjamin Bloodwell is excellent in the newly-shot material, and Michael J. Palmer edits the huge mass of footage to add a sense of propulsion even as the coverage expands.  Daniel Pemberton’s score adapts itself well to the shifting subjects.      

Truth be told, Gibney was right in initially doubting whether to undertake a study of a man who’s been so widely covered already.  “Musk” doesn’t offer startling new revelations, but its comprehensiveness and almost obsessive detail are justification enough for its existence.  Exhaustive, and to some extent exhausting, it provides an incisive, if bloated, look at a man whose enormous wealth, extremist views and political reach represent, in the opinion of many, a real and present danger to the country and the world—a malevolent, abrasive, avaricious, duplicitous egomaniac consumed by self-interest. 

Anyone who disputes the accuracy of Gibney’s portrait is invited to provide an alternative one arguing that Musk is benevolent, cuddly, generous, truthful, and humble, motivated by a genuine love of others that leads him to be self-sacrificing and unconcerned with his own reputation.  It’s doubtful that anyone would take up that challenge, however large a bankroll he might provide.