Leave your brain at the door, lest you want your IQ pulverized, if you see Taika Waititi’s confoundingly awful, relentlessly twee Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation, “Klara and the Sun.” Starring Jenna Ortega as solar-powered AF (artificial friend) Klara, whose overexposure to broad, deeply stupid human feelings starts to empower her with them, it’s this year’s “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” — another auteur-backed misfire and unintended preamble to director jail.
Where Ishiguro, the Nobel-winning Japanese-British author of “The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go,” writes in plaintive, precise prose grounded in ambiguous emotions, Waititi fills in the spaces with pastel-popped set design, thwacks of whimsy, and gauche slapstick comedy that undermine every already-half-hearted gesture at profundity. Take a scene where two characters run to Klara’s rescue amid a burning building, only to get shocked by an electric fence at least three times, but more, I think. Michael Giacchino’s bathetic score, layered over such a bizarrely cued pratfall, crystallizes precisely the miscalculated clash of tensions felt in every frame as the movie supposedly hurtles toward a big emotional climax. “Klara and the Sun” is pathologically allergic to sincerity, treating major existential questions as treacle — and worse, uncuriously.
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This latest Dystopian Future World That Reflects Our Own is comprised of what-else-but rigidly stratified class structures, bespoke genetic engineering available only to the wealthiest, and super-sentient artificial intelligence. That would be Kara, a now-obsolete B2 model android companion. She’s human on the outside, but all conductor wires and an inky, petrol-like liquid on the inside. One bug suggests she’s ready for factory recall: Klara can’t stop standing on one leg in tree pose, a glitch in her matrix and a gag that Waititi returns to again and again to absolutely no effect other than in irritating the hell out of the audience. She spends her numbered days and ways — numbered in the sense that she’s due to be shipped back to the factory for destruction — pining for the “super-duper nourishing nourishment” of the slats of sunlight slipping through the grille separating the shop from the city center.
When the shutters come up and Store Manager (Natasha Lyonne as, I believe, herself) opens the shop, Klara and her android cohorts must strike a pose, dance-monkey-dance style, in the window to allure potential buyers to take them. But they’re already dazzled and distracted by the shiny newness of the Looksmaxxed model B3s across the street. Lucky for Klara, a very lonely, very sick girl named Josie (Mia Tharia) wants to buy her, much to the chagrin of her dismissive, martinet of a mother, Chrissie (Amy Adams, in yet another role that’s… what’s the opposite of plum?).
Josie and her single mom live on a middle-of-nowhere farm where the biggest threat (and, apparently, the movie’s arch villain) is a self-driving crop harvester manufactured by a company called Cootings. Josie is an only child who’s been “Lifted,” meaning her genetic makeup has been altered to retrofit what must’ve been an underachieving streak into a stroke of genius. She paints masterpieces and reads the great novels, day and night, as Chrissie readies her daughter for the Atlas Brookings school of gifted children. (Though when we meet her classmates, they’re all dullards with speech affectations and severely over-swaddled, sleeping-bag-like couture.)
Klara, whose philosophical raptures treat the Sun as a living deity and who is also capable of parroting any human’s voice or temperament on command, becomes fast friends with the girl. But the Lifting procedure has stricken Josie with some sort of unspecified neurological disorder that gets activated when the duo and Josie’s friend Rick (Aran Murphy) take a joyride in Chrissie’s self-driving Buick. One minute they’re flying through the fields with mirthful abandon, the next, smash cut to the car in a tree, and Josie in a coma in bed with tubes attached. The capricious shift is whiplash-inducing, as if editors Adam Gough and Tom Eagles cleaved a sizable chunk of footage from the film. Or are Waititi and co-writer Dahvi Waller deliberately obfuscating as some kind of middle finger to the audience? Really, you’re left wondering what just happened, and every cutaway to Klara’s literally juddering first-person viewpoint (which Josie also appears to share) doesn’t help clarify any of the narrative muddlement.
Steve Buscemi plays a Dr. Frankenstein type who holds the key to unlocking whatever’s medically afoot with Josie, and to Chrissie keeping her daughter alive if the girl doesn’t make it through the next nosebleed. From there, “Klara and the Sun” devolves into a kind of kooky pas de deux between Chrissie and Klara as Josie convalesces. At one point, as a fed-up Chrissie tries to shove Klara back into the deteriorating cardboard box from whence the girl came, she barks at Klara to “upsy-daisy” and get out of the box when it won’t close. “Who’s Daisy?” Klara asks. The film’s pick-me jabs at humor are frankly, flatly unfunny and grating, twisting the film at times into a perverse, almost self-aware treatise on tweeness. But that would be giving the movie too much intellectual credit.
The New Zealand actor and filmmaker is never an artist who takes the material too seriously. See how he turned fascism into Oscar-minted farce with Best Adapted Screenplay winner “Jojo Rabbit.” Here, his clumsy, winky, affected, and self-undercutting direction can’t even work the charming Jenna Ortega to a great performance, as her Klara is flattened into a bundle of manic pixie mannerisms both physical and verbal.
Ortega’s plenty magnetic on Netflix’s “Wednesday,” but her streak of recent film roles — from Sundance’s grueling art-world satire “The Gallerist” to the disastrous Weeknd vehicle “Hurry Up Tomorrow” and A24’s busted monster franchise-nonstarter “Death of a Unicorn” — suggests her talents are being staggeringly misapplied on the big screen. (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” writer/director Mary Bronstein, however, is hopefully coming to the rescue with her next movie.) For a movie filled with self-driving cars and powered by artificial intelligence, this “Klara” goes nowhere but straight into the sun of disaster, and without intelligence of any kind.
Grade: D
“Klara and the Sun” opens in theaters starting Friday, October 23.