Taika Waititi’s Klara and the Sun starts from the familiar place of many stories about the nature of being human. Klara (Jenna Ortega) is a robot from a discontinued model that is still for sale at a ragtag robot shop managed by a lady only known as Store Manager (Natasha Lyonne). Klara, like all of these things, is special. A different kind of robot that all the other discontinued models find peculiar but charming. Her hair is rowdy like a young Einstein. She lifts her leg at random times for apparently no reason (though it seems to happen mostly when she meets someone new). And she idolises the sun like a deity, which baffles every other robot in the shop who doesn’t understand the concept of religious dogma.
Maybe that’s why she hasn’t been sold, which can condemn her to deactivation and being torn down for parts. Maybe it’s because another shop just opened across the road and they sell a new model of hot robot friends who look like K-pop stars and unattainable supermodels. Whatever it is, Klara catches the eye of Josie (Mia Tharia), the adolescent daughter of a rich interior designer, Chrissy (Amy Adams). Josie is lonely in the big country house where she lives with her mother and housekeeper, Melania (Rachel House), surrounded by wheat fields and barely anything else. Josie is also a kind of augmented teenager (called “lifted”), who undertook a procedure to her brain that makes her hyperintelligent and talented, but with that, the burden of separation from the local boy she fancies, Rick (Aran Muprhy), a genuinely talented mechanical whizz who rejected the same procedure.
It feels like on top of this mundane episode of a little house in the wheat field, is a dark, traumatic secret. Chrissy’s first daughter passed away young. Chrissy never recovered from the loss, and Josie never recovered from failing to meet her mother’s expectations. And if that wasn’t enough drama, Josie herself suffers from a potentially terminal condition.
It’s in this tableau that Klara arrives, like Amélie Poulain via Encino Man. Klara behaves beyond child-like, closer to an alien still learning spatial awareness. The one truth she holds, which no one disputes, is that the sun is a powerful, all-knowing being, and he lives in the barn across the hill.
It’s A.I. and After Yang, but without the sense of wonder in the face of unknown adversity of the former, or the quiet introspection of the latter. Waititi’s sin is that he can’t find a way to perfectly connect his zany comedic timing with the darker tones the story hints at. This is, at the end, adapted from a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro (who also appears on the credits as executive producer), and though I never read this particular work, I know his style. A couple of years ago, Ishiguro wrote the screenplay for the remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru in the wonderful Living, a film that permeated its subtlety with a strong emotional flair. So why is Waititi’s film so heavy-handed?
Characters don’t really talk — they expose their feelings and thoughts like they are dictating emotional cues to a clueless actor. The plot exposition - Klara and the Sun - is also the subtextual exposition: all platitudes about grief, life, and death so inane they wouldn’t even fit on a third-rate condolences card.
And that’s disappointing because there are moments where Waititi hits a stride, especially when he’s allowed to veer off the main plot. There’s a whole sequence where Josie and Rick hang out with a group of obnoxious lifted teens who humiliate Josie for fraternising with a non-lifted and an expired robot. Waititi adds a bit of Terry Gilliam satire to the scene that works really well, especially because it feels genuine without needing to make a philosophically moot point. He brings Michael Giacchino to sign this Elfman-esque soundtrack, which reveals Waititi’s intentions, but even Burton had some nuance to his style.
Ortega’s choice of adding a unique physicality to her performance is also great. Klara is annoyingly infantile, but Ortega doesn’t turn that into a weakness. Her movements and jerky, odd moments have touches of Chaplin. She stumbles around like a smiling rag doll, which adds this element that other similar films with companion androids miss - to remind us that this protagonist is not human. It’s a welcoming contrast to Adams’ stiff and uninspiring Chrissy. Near the end, the film adds a genuinely disturbing dark tone that I thought would let Adams shine, but Waititi caves in and lets his characters out of the hole by reciting another dull cliché.
The frustration is that Klara and the Sun almost works. It’s best when Waititi lets his kookiness run amok, which reveals the themes of this story more effectively. But then he doesn’t trust his audience to read between the lines.
The plus: Jenna Ortega, please, you deserve better. Can’t keep being positive in mediocre films.
The minus: As Gen-Z says, it’s the cringe. The eye-rolling cringe.