As an 'artificial friend' purchased for an ailing teen, Jenna Ortega tries hard to illuminate this misbegotten Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation, but Waititi's decision to play it for strained, whimsical comedy is ruinous.
By Guy Lodge
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Film Critic
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Sony Adapting a solemnly complex, questioning novel as a cockeyed child’s-eye comedy worked once before for Taika Waititi — which is to say that “Jojo Rabbit,” his crass, mawkish “anti-hate satire” about a Hitler Youth member’s personal and political awakening, won him an Oscar and grossed nearly $100 million, in spite of its manifold artistic and ethical shortcomings. But even that film’s many defenders are unlikely to be moved in sizable numbers by his twee, pulseless fantasy “Klara and the Sun” — such a hopeless mismatch of filmmaker and source material, it appears to be have been assembled as a kind of perverse defy-the-odds challenge. Whether there was ever a successful movie to be made of Kazuo Ishiguro’s finespun, melancholic, almost brittly interior study of android consciousness is open to question, but Waititi should reasonably be in the bottom tier of auteurs you’d enlist to try, maybe just ahead of Baz Luhrmann, but a notch below Quentin Tarantino.
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