Adapting a solemnly complex, questioning novel as a cockeyed child’s-eye comedy worked once before for Taika Waititi — which is to say that “Jojo Rabbit,” his crass, mawkish “anti-hate satire” about a Hitler Youth member’s personal and political awakening, won him an Oscar and grossed nearly $100 million, in spite of its manifold artistic and ethical shortcomings. But even that film’s many defenders are unlikely to be moved in sizable numbers by his twee, pulseless fantasy “Klara and the Sun” — such a hopeless mismatch of filmmaker and source material, it appears to be have been assembled as a kind of perverse defy-the-odds challenge. Whether there was ever a successful movie to be made of Kazuo Ishiguro’s finespun, melancholic, almost brittly interior study of android consciousness is open to question, but Waititi should reasonably be in the bottom tier of auteurs you’d enlist to try, maybe just ahead of Baz Luhrmann, but a notch below Quentin Tarantino.
Published in 2021, “Klara and the Sun” is a confidently delicate novel, skirting slightness — as well as a bit of thematic recycling — in the way that a recent Nobel laureate can afford to do. It reads as something of a companion piece to “Never Let Me Go,” Ishiguro’s sober, mournful study of a human clone reflecting on her place in a hostile universe; swap in AI robots for clones, and “Klara” plows much the same field. “Never Let Me Go” got a fitting adaptation in Mark Romanek’s chilly, elegant 2010 drama of the same title; that film couldn’t have been more stylistically coordinated to the author’s voice, and you’d hardly expect the director of “What We Do in the Shadows” and two “Thor” movies to take the same approach.
But from the very first tinkly strains of Michael Giacchino’s overbearingly precious score, it’s obvious that moist-eyed whimsy is an ill-chosen path; the filmmaker’s variously cutesy, kooky affectations fight the stoic sadness of Ishiguro’s storytelling at every turn. (The author takes an executive producer credit, and one would give several pennies for his thoughts.) Having premiered at London after being conspicuously absent from September’s season-launching festivals, “Klara and the Sun” will open in theaters on October 23, and looks to have all the cultural staying power of a standard ChatGPT conversation — with any audiences that do turn up likely to be nonplussed by a fable that’s pitched too juvenile for adults, and way too dull for children.
The comedy is broadest, and therefore most strikingly unfunny, in an opening section that plays as a ghastly dystopian update of “Annie” — introducing Ortega’s perma-sparkly Klara as one of several lonely humanoid AFs (artificial friends) awaiting human purchase in a store managed in tough-love fashion by a hard-mugging Natasha Lyonne. We are some way into a post-Third World War future where the internet has collapsed and people are largely housebound; the wealthy buy AFs to keep their isolated, unsocialized children company. Not that you get much sense of this reality — or any reality at all, really — from Michael Berlucchi’s textureless, aggressively gold-filtered lensing or Ra Vincent’s daintily retro production design, least of all in Lyonne’s midcentury-style Friend Store: Humanity already appears to be occupying a floaty simulacrum of the way things were.
Ortega, button-cute amid the eeriness of everything else, never bursts into a rendition of “Tomorrow,” but she does open the film with a winsome monologue thanking the sun for her existence — she is solar-powered, after all — and praying to the godly orb for a loving buyer, so close enough. She finally gets her wish when sullen teen Josie (promising British talent Mia Tharia, recently seen in “The Education of Jane Cumming”) spots her in the shop window, is beguiled by her visible quirkiness (she stands on one leg, for starters) and persuades her uptight mother Chrissy (Amy Adams, as prim and hard as the string of pearls around her neck) to bring the robot girl home to their isolated and wholly unbelievable Midwest-ish farmhouse.
There, Klara’s attempts to fit into a dysfunctional human household yield some halting fish-out-of-water hijinks, 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 tipping toward tragedy, over which Waititi has no more command than its flatlining comedy: Josie, it emerges, has a life-threatening illness, which puts Klara in a rather more crucial position in the family than anyone initially dared to admit. And so the script — written by Waititi with TV vet Dahvi Waller (“Mrs. America”) in her first big-screen credit — blunders into existential explorations of artificial life and afterlife that any 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, innately charismatic as ever, tries to make Klara enough of a life force to give these conflicts and considerations some weight, but is defeated by the one-note writing of her character as a relentlessly hopeful, Pollyanna-esque naif. The story’s later stages hinge on Klara’s faltering, increasingly shattered digital memory, but save for some glitching, strikingly pixelated graphics, we never get a vivid sense of how she actually sees the world. Not that her human counterparts feel any richer or realer, with Adams particularly script-trapped as the stiffly guarded Chrissy, who shoulders enough grief, both lingering and preemptive, to match the actor’s “Arrival” character, yet never gets to give it satisfying expression.
Ishiguro’s novel was plainspoken in its pathos, as has always been the author’s gift: His characters carry the disappointments and more crushing losses of their lives as part of their everyday routine, often acknowledging and dismissing them in the same simple sentence. Waititi’s writing, even in its best vehicles, has no such piercing gift. He aims to smuggle feeling in through irony and farce, intrusions that here curdle unhappily with the heartsore earnestness of the source. If there were any more life to the filmmaking, this tension could least be interesting, but the results are both perky and inert, unreal but entirely unmoored in time and space. As desperate to be loved as its beaming heroine, but far more knowingly so, Waititi’s “Klara and the Sun” is a warmly worded Hallmark card from an artificial friend.