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as artificial friends to serve as consolation to customers in a dystopian post-World War III world, are unfortunately outdated, discontinued models, which explains why the store across the street, with its newer androids, is enjoying brisker sales.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.