Despite a solid cast, this futuristic fable doesn’t have much of a glow
Klara and the Sun
Starring Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams & Mia Laura Thara
Directed by Taika Waititi
Rated PG-13
In theaters Friday, Oct. 23, 2006
In the not-so-distant dystopia of this futuristic fantasy flick, robots that look identical to people will be sold in stores, just like furniture or appliances. Pick one out, take it home, and it’s yours.
Klara (Jenna Ortega) is a female bot, marketed as an AF, an artificial friend. She fervently wants someone to pick her for purchase before her discontinued model gets sent to the AF scrapheap for recycling by the store manager (Natasha Lyonne). Lucky for Klara, another girl, Josie (Mia Laura Thara), selects her from the display window, and boom—she’s boxed up and delivered.
Klara is solar-powered and outright worships the sun; she talks to it, thanks it, asks it for things. She thinks it lives in a barn, on a hill outside her window. Without the sun, her battery would be ka-put. She thinks a robotic harvester is a monster.
Director Taika Waititi (JoJo Rabbitt, What We Do in the Shadows) has a solid cast, including Amy Adams as Josie’s bitchy mom and Steve Buscemi as a shady doctor specializing in a very specific kind of grief therapy. Ortega, just into her early 20s, has been acting since her childhood in Disney’s Stuck in the Middle, and in movies like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff series Wednesday.
But here Waititi seems to confuse quirks for substance, despite its capable cast. It’s sappy and soppy, full of peculiarity but coming up empty on most everything else. Its attempts at humor and comedy seem forced and fall flat. It swirls with stuff, but little of it sticks. It glops sentimental hokum over situations of hurt and loss, romps through ideas about love and friendship, takes a quick jab at racism, and touches lightly on the dangers and downsides of genetic engineering and human replicating.
There’s even a flimsy grab at the cinematic coattails of The Wizard of Oz (a robotic scarecrow) and an oddly placed reference to The Little Mermaid. Adams is atrociously cast in evil-stepmom mode that doesn’t fit her at all. Buscemi, known for his wily and menacing performances in edgy films like Fargo and Reservoir Dogs, seems so stiff, constrained and out of place, in his one scene, you can practically see him cashing his paycheck when he’s out of camera range.
Ortega throws herself in her role—sometimes literally—but Klara’s “childlike” innocence, and her first-time experiences in the outside world, come off as contrived and stage-y.
And for a movie taking place, we’re told, after an apocalyptic world war has left everything in ruins, well, those golden fields of wheat—through which Klara likes to leap throughout the film—look remarkably healthy.
At one point, Amy Adam’s character asks a house full of genetically enhanced weirdo kids, “What the hell is going on here?”
I have to admit, by the time the movie was over, I was wondering the same thing.
—Neil Pond