by Flynn Shan Benson
Worth: $9.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mia Tharia, Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams, Aran Murphy, Steve Buscemi, Natasha Lyonne
Intro:
... funny enough, that is emotional enough, without upsetting any member of the family who goes along to see it.
Here’s one guess at how Klara and the Sun got made: in 2020, during the doldrums of Covid, Sony bought the film rights to the new novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, a year ahead of the book’s release. A new story by the Nobel laureate, the Booker winner, the writer of the Young Adult masterpiece Never Let Me Go — how could it not be great? Even better, the book’s about AI and children and the power of love, so there’s room for a family feature there.
It must have been a sad day for the film producers — not necessarily the most literate people on the planet — when they discovered that Klara was a strange, uncomfortably sincere, intermittently brilliant novel about a robot’s quest for salvation in a ruined world, all underwritten by a deep strain of existential melancholy.
Then, two years later, they solved the conundrum of adaptation by hiring Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor: Ragnarok), thinking that his trademark humour and Marvel bona fides would set this adaptation on the path for commercial success. It-girl Jenna Ortega (Wednesday) was cast, the director shot the production in his native New Zealand, and then, after two years of post-production, Sony’s literary bet has finally landed here — turning out like an above-average Disney Channel movie, with as close a relation to its source material as The Lion King has to Hamlet.
Klara (Ortega) is an Artificial Friend, an advanced robot that exists in an unspecified future to provide company and care to lonely, privileged children. The sun is what powers her solar battery, though the childlike Klara treats it as a beneficent god. We meet her in the store, where she waits, along with the other twee robots, for someone to adopt her. Ortega enthusiastically plays the robot as clumsy, distracted, idiosyncratic, and emotional — completely unlike any form of AI today, completely unlike the protagonist of the original novel, but a perfectly winning character for a kids’ film.
Salvation comes for Klara in the form of Josie (Mia Tharia), a young girl who picks her to live with her, no matter that she’s an older model, no matter that her mother (Amy Adams, making some effort to earn her paycheck) is uneasy about the robot. After landing in the retro-futurist country house, Klara engages in slapstick antics and discovers that Josie is ‘lifted’, a process that edited her genes to make her a genius. It means sh’’ll be able to be educated and join society’s elite — but it’s also made her very sick.
So, the bright-eyed robot tries, in sequences that riff on The Wizard of Oz and Back to the Future Part II, to find her way in this world, to help cure Josie, and to figure out if humans are worth trusting (no prizes for guessing the answer). Lurking behind all this are sinister plots and machines emitting toxic pollution, though Klara is too comfortable in its deadpan, heart-warming register to really deal with any of it.
Waititi is a director who broke out with his independent New Zealand films, and now works with major studios while retaining a bit of personality. It’s a perfectly respectable career, if not inspiring — just ask Peter Jackson and Denis Villeneuve. So, he has made here a film that is competently crafted, that is funny enough, that is emotional enough, without upsetting any member of the family who goes along to see it. It’s the kind of familiar, mildly stimulating story that’s best watched sleep-deprived on a plane.
But perhaps, like Wuthering Heights, or Frankenstein, or One Battle After Another, and the other second-rate literary adaptations that come out, Klara will still achieve something — by making its viewers pick up a book and look at a real piece of art.
