Taika Waititi has already managed to adapt a solemnly complex and questioning novel into a ridiculous children’s comedy — that is, “Jojo Rabbit,” his crude and mawkish “anti-hate satire” about the personal and political awakening of a member of the Hitler Youth, won him an Oscar and grossed nearly $100 million, despite its multiple artistic and ethical shortcomings. But even this film’s many defenders probably won’t be moved in numbers by its moronic, pulseless fantasy “Klara and the Sun” — such a desperate mismatch between the filmmaker and the source material that it seems to have been assembled as some sort of perverse, odds-defying challenge. Whether there has ever been a successful film about Kazuo Ishiguro’s fine, melancholy, almost brittle inner study of android consciousness is debatable, but Waititi should reasonably be in the lower tier of auteurists you’d enlist to try, perhaps just ahead of Baz Luhrmann, but a notch below Quentin Tarantino.
Published in 2021, “Klara and the Sun” is a decidedly delicate novel, avoiding levity – as well as a bit of thematic recycling – as a recent Nobel laureate can afford to do. It reads as a sort of companion piece to “Never Let Me Go,” Ishiguro’s sober and sad study of a human clone reflecting on his place in a hostile universe; swap AI robots for clones, and “Klara” plows pretty much the same field. “Never Let Me Go” got a proper adaptation in Mark Romanek’s cold and stylish 2010 drama of the same title; this film could not have been more stylistically coordinated with the author’s voice, and one would hardly expect the director of “What We Do in the Shadows” and two “Thor” films to take the same approach.
But from the first tinkling notes of Michael Giacchino’s extremely precious score, it’s clear that dewy-eyed fantasy is a poorly chosen path; the filmmaker’s cutesy and eccentric affectations combat at every moment the stoic sadness of Ishiguro’s narration. (The author takes executive producer credit, and we’d give several cents for his thoughts.) Premiering in London after being noticeably absent from September’s season-opening festivals, “Klara and the Sun” hits theaters Oct. 23 and appears to have all the cultural staying power of a standard ChatGPT conversation — audiences who show up will likely be baffled by a fable that’s too juvenile for adults and far too boring. for children.
The comedy is broadest, and therefore most striking, in an opening section that plays like a gruesome dystopian update of “Annie” — introducing Ortega’s perma-sparkle Klara as one of many lonely humanoid AFs (artificial friends) waiting for a human purchase at a store run toughly and lovingly by an aggressive Natasha Lyonne. We are heading toward a post-World War III future where the Internet has collapsed and people are largely confined to their homes; the rich buy AFs to keep their isolated and unsocialized children company. Not that you get much sense of this reality – or any reality, really – from Michael Berlucchi’s textureless, aggressively gold-filtered lens or Ra Vincent’s delicately retro production design, much less from Lyonne’s mid-century-style Friend Store: humanity already seems to occupy a floating simulacrum of the way things used to be.
Ortega, cute amid the weirdness of everything else, never bursts into a rendition of “Tomorrow,” but she opens the film with a seductive monologue thanking the sun for her existence – she runs on solar power, after all – and praying to the divine orb for a loving buyer, so close. She finally gets her wish when sullen teenager Josie (promising British talent Mia Tharia, recently seen in “The Education of Jane Cumming”) spots her in the window, is seduced by her visible oddity (she stands on one leg, for starters) and persuades her uptight mother Chrissy (Amy Adams, as prim and tough as the pearl necklace around her neck) to take the robot girl home to their isolated and totally unbelievable Midwest. farm.
There, Klara’s attempts to fit into a dysfunctional human household result in halting detours, as she rubs both Chrissy and brusque Kiwi housekeeper Melania (Rachel House) the wrong way, while enchanting Josie with her open heart and ingenuous curiosity. But here, the film’s tonal balance begins to lean toward tragedy, over which Waititi has no more control than his flat comedy: Josie, it emerges, suffers from a life-threatening illness, which places Klara in a far more crucial position in the family than anyone initially dared admit. So the screenplay — written by Waititi with TV veteran Dahvi Waller (“Mrs. America”) in her first big-screen credits — launches into existential explorations of artificial life and the afterlife that a number of recent, comparably lo-fi works, from “Ex Machina” to “Marjorie Prime” to “Her” to “Robot Dreams,” have probed with more nuance and wit.
Ortega, naturally charismatic as always, tries to make Klara enough of a life force to give some weight to these conflicts and considerations, but is defeated by the one-note writing of her character as a Pollyanna-like naive, hopeful and implacable. Later stages of the story depend on Klara’s faltering and increasingly broken digital memory, but aside from some faulty and noticeably pixelated graphics, we never get a clear sense of how she actually sees the world. Not that her human counterparts feel any richer or more real, with Adams particularly trapped in the storyline as the closely guarded Chrissy, who endures enough grief, both lingering and preventive, to match the actor’s “Arrival” persona, but never manages to give it satisfying expression.
Ishiguro’s novel was frank in its pathos, as has always been the author’s gift: his characters carry the most crushing disappointments and losses of their lives as part of their daily routine, often recognizing and rejecting them in the same simple sentence. Waititi’s writing, even in his best vehicles, doesn’t have such a piercing gift. It aims to smuggle feelings in through irony and farce, intrusions which here unfortunately curdle with the painful seriousness of the source. If there were more life in cinema, this tension might be less interesting, but the results are both cheerful and inert, unreal but totally disconnected from time and space. As desperate to be loved as its radiant heroine, but much more knowingly, Waititi’s “Klara and the Sun” is a Hallmark card warmly phrased by an artificial friend.
Gn entert
