Some people scoff at emotionally draining movies, as if resisting the urge to cry makes them mighty warriors, even though they’re losing a battle with their own soul. An old-fashioned, three-hanky movie can be subtle or overwrought, but either way it’s an important outlet for our biggest feelings. We all need an excuse to let our salty tears run around and play a little. Movies that give us the feels have value, and they deserve our respect.
Usually. “Klara and the Sun” is an exception. Taika Waititi’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 science fiction novel has a lot of emotions, but it struggles to differentiate between them. At one point a robot says great stories appear sweet but have an underlying sadness, and that can be true — but if the storyteller gets overzealous about wrapping melancholy up inside a cheerful package, they can accidentally crush them together until it’s just a lump of broken stuff. Thank you for the present, it was a very nice thought, but there’s literally nothing we can do with it.
“Klara and the Sun” stars Jenna Ortega as Klara. She’s a robot. She was designed to be a companion but until a human actually wants her she’s desperately lonely and terrified of being recycled for scrap. Why, exactly, someone thought it was necessary to give Klara and her robot friends the capacity to feel so rejected and unloved that, in Klara’s case, they’re forced to invent a makeshift religion just to give their lives meaning is never explored. That’s not an undercurrent of sadness. That’s cynical, cruel menace, and it’s rotting its way through every scene.
But don’t look at that, certainly not for long. Whenever Taika Waititi catches a glimpse of the horrors of this sci-fi utopia he turns away, rejecting the idea that this isn’t just a bittersweet story about innocence and love. There’s a scene when Klara’s new owner Josie (Mia Tharia), who was surgically altered to increase her brain power, spends time alone with other modified teenagers. They’re so divorced from humanity that they wear sleeping bags for fashion and talk like a parody version of a parody version of a Monty Python sketch about rich people. In this moment “Klara and the Sun” gets close to Luis Buñuel levels of absurdity and briefly becomes honest. It’s blunt, but it engages with what we’re actually seeing.
And yet we are forced to go back to the plot, and the plot is about naive, innocent Klara trying to save Josie’s life, because she’s very, very sick. Klara runs on solar power, so she has accepted the sun as her personal deity. She prays to it for help and guidance. By golly, Klara and her bespoke god will find a way to make Josie better again, even if it means being insufferably twee for two hours.
Amy Adams co-stars as Josie’s mother, a woman who already lost one daughter and is scared of losing another, which leads her down a dark path. This path qualifies as the film’s only meaningful twist, even though it’s foreshadowed, underlined, italicized, highlighted and has a big red arrow pointing at it. But let’s be polite and not describe it, except to say it’s an intriguing and depressing concept that Waititi only addresses enough to try and give his audience the feels. Then he backs away in favor of a contrived, tearjerk-ier conclusion, which makes some of the characters feel better but ignores the fact that, if this is how technology has affected the human experience, every single one of these characters functionally lives in hell.
Exploring the way people use superficial pleasantries to obfuscate their inner torment, and overlook society’s many evils, can make for absorbing storytelling. Taika Waititi previously made masterful films that navigated ugly worlds with humor and sensitivity, especially “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” but even the bizarre and divisive “Jojo Rabbit” manages, if nothing else, to keep two separate ideas alive at the same time: that the world is a grotesque and violent place, warped by fascism and antisemitism; and that the young protagonist is too immature and gullible to understand any of it.
Klara is too naive to understand her world, which makes sense, but Taika Waititi doesn’t seem to get it either. He presents the insecurities of the wealthy as a great tragedy and the systemic horrors of the society they inhabit as an ironic backdrop to that plight. It’s true that Waititi, who co-wrote the screenplay with Dahvi Waller, acknowledges the dichotomy, but it’s also true that he’s more invested in the idea that this piece of property has some growing up to do than any of the other, more complicated issues Kazuo Ishiguro’s story constantly raises. And Klara doesn’t even have to grow up much, since her story ultimately deteriorates into contrivance, followed by annoying, contrived ambiguity.
No one can say Jenna Ortega isn’t a team player, since she throws herself into the body of this curious robot, with arch, calculated movements that are simultaneously humorous and, within the world of “Klara and the Sun,” logical. But the film can only get so much mileage from her ‘golly gee whiz’ persona, and the character’s lack of complexity eventually becomes the film’s greatest hindrance. Her faith in humanity, and in god, leads her to a place that can only be read as miserable and cruel. Waititi presents it, at worst, as bittersweet, as though we’re supposed to shake our heads and chuckle. Oh Klara, what shenanigans you got up to this time.
We should be weeping, just not for the reasons “Klara and the Sun” wants us to weep. Almost every movie is emotionally manipulative. That’s how movies evoke emotions in the first place, so it’s usually not worth mentioning. We only break out the expression “emotionally manipulative” if the filmmaking is so clumsy that the manipulation doesn’t work. The underlying emotional and practical truths within “Klara and the Sun” are bypassed in favor of cloying, overblown melodrama, and because the film ignores its own reality, including the sad stuff, it can’t make us cry. And that, more than anything else in this disappointing misfire, makes me sad.
