Klara and the Sun Is a Waste of Jenna Ortega

Jenna Ortega has a face of such doll-like proportions, heart-shaped and huge-eyed, that her evolution from Disney Channel teen to scream queen was as much a feat of canny rebranding as an expression of self. No one wants to be typecast as cute, especially not someone who started acting at the age of nine, when cuteness is taken for granted. Playing an unblinking Wednesday Addams for Netflix and ducking killers as Tara Carpenter in two Scream installments allowed Ortega to navigate the transition out of child stardom with goth-inflected grace, adding edge to her image without her to rush into the sort of parts that have historically signaled an actor has grown up. Ortega’s still playing teenagers half the time, and she’s playing something like one in Klara and the Sun, director Taika Waititi’s misbegotten adaptation of the Kazuo Ishiguro novel. She’s Klara, an “Artificial Friend” — one of the robots who, in the nearish future in which the film takes place, are sold to wealthy parents as companions for the isolated children they’ve been raising and shaping like bonsai trees.

Klara looks like she could be around the same age as Josie (Mia Tharia), the girl she’s bought to accompany, though, as she recites from ad copy, she’s developmentally closer to a toddler. Programmed to be devoted and cheery, the character differs from the moody young women that Ortega has gravitated toward in recent years, but the movie still gets a lot of mileage out of the distance between its star’s guileless-looking, wide-open face and the understated horrors of how its characters are living. Klara is oblivious and innocent — she is, essentially, a doll, albeit an incredibly high-end one who’s powered by solar energy and who’s come up with her own personal religion revolving around the sun. On paper, at least, it’s another smart role for Ortega, who’s able to deploy her appearance to dissonant ends, embodying a character with a hopelessly constrained worldview who nevertheless is always taking in details about the world around her that others might miss.

It’s just a shame about everything else in the movie, which takes Ishiguro’s account of life as a member of a dystopian underclass and tries to marry it to Waititi’s impishness. When Mark Romanek took on Never Let Me Go, the Ishiguro novel that’s this one’s spiritual companion, he crafted something that exuded autumnal melancholy, as fits a story about characters whose abbreviated lives mean that they’re mourning their youth as they’re still living it. But Waititi, continuing a rough run after Thor: Love and Thunder and Next Goal Wins, isn’t adapting so much as he is running through the novel in the humorous-sentimental tone he’s established as his signature, and which has curdled in recent years into something cutesy-smug. He approaches Klara and the Sun like someone working with source material that needs punching up. The opening act of the film is packed with pratfalls involving the AFs in Klara’s store being expected to pose like mannequins mid-activity in the display case, while gazing balefully at a store across the street in which newer models strut like they’re on a runway show.

Waititi’s touchstone for his movie appears to be Edward Scissorhands, down to working with recent Tim Burton alum Ortega. But that 1990 film was a fable and a fantasy, and this one is a sci-fi drama that raises a dozen new questions about its premise for every one that it answers. Waititi’s the opposite of a detailed world-builder, which can be a good quality — his joyful disregard is what made his first Thor film so enjoyable. But here it leads to something so rickety that it threatens to fall apart before it even gets to the rural house where Josie lives with her mother, Chrissie (Amy Adams), an interior designer. Josie, like most children of means, has been subjected to a procedure called “lifting,” which makes the recipients it doesn’t kill into intellectually enhanced geniuses who are likely to rule the world. Unfortunately for Josie, her lifting didn’t go well, and while Chrissie hasn’t told her child she’s dying yet, she’s also acting like the girl is already gone. This is a brutal role for Adams, made worse by the fact that Waititi feels the need to soften the character at the end, as though the genuinely awful ways in which she behaves can be resolved with a line or two about grief making people crazy.

But no one comes off well, aside from Ortega. Tharia, as Josie, and Aran Murphy, who plays her sweetheart, the non-lifted boy next door Rick, just come across as winsome kids who happen to exist in a brightly colored nightmare, reminiscent of Waititi’s egregious WWII movie Jojo Rabbit. The great New Zealand actor Rachel House, as Chrissie’s housekeeper, has been tasked with bringing a discordantly comedic note by playing the character as overtly resentful of Klara’s arrival. Natasha Lyonne just goes big as the manager of the store Klara comes from, while Steve Buscemi is oddly understated and twinkly for a mysterious character who proposes something terrible in the name of never needing to mourn. No one is on the same page as to what the tone of the movie should be. Waititi never settles on one either, most often opting for a glibness that treats key aspects of the plot, including Klara’s rudimentary faith, into something like a joke. While Ortega doesn’t portray the character’s beliefs with that same dismissiveness, what’s supposed to be a grand act of love and sacrifice nevertheless just slides past, as though the whole movie were coated in Teflon. They’ve probably come up with better non-stick materials in the future, but by then this movie, despite its pedigree, will also be little more than a blip in the career of its star.