Jenna Ortega has a face so doll-like in proportion, heart-shaped and huge-eyed, that her evolution from Disney Channel teen to scream queen was as much a feat of clever rebranding as it was self-expression. No one wants to be labeled as cute, especially not someone who started acting at the age of nine, when cuteness is taken for granted. Unblinkingly playing a Wednesday Addams for Netflix and dodging killers as Tara Carpenter in two Shout the installments allowed Ortega to navigate the transition out of child stardom with a gothic-tinged grace, adding an edge to her image without her rushing into the kinds of roles that historically signaled that an actor had grown up. Ortega still plays teenagers half the time, and she plays something like a teenager Klara and the sundirector Taika Waititi’s misbegotten adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. This is Klara, an “artificial friend” – one of the robots who, in the near future where the film takes place, are sold to wealthy parents as companions for the isolated children whom they raise and shape like bonsai trees.
Klara appears to be about the same age as Josie (Mia Tharia), the girl she bought to accompany, although, as she recites from an ad copy, she is developmentally closer to a toddler. Programmed to be dutiful and cheerful, the character differs from the brooding young women Ortega has gravitated toward in recent years, but the film still gets a lot of mileage out of the distance between its star’s naive, wide-open face and the quiet horrors of the way its characters live. Klara is unconscious and innocent – she Eastessentially, a doll, albeit an incredibly high-end one, powered by solar energy and who has invented her own personal religion revolving around the sun. On paper, at least, it’s another clever role for Ortega, who is able to deploy his appearance to dissonant ends, playing a character with a desperately constrained worldview who nonetheless always takes into account details of the world around him that others might miss.
It’s just a shame about everything else in the film, which takes Ishiguro’s tale of life as a member of a dystopian underclass and attempts to marry it with Waititi’s playfulness. When Mark Romanek took Never let me gothe Ishiguro novel that is its spiritual companion, he has created something that exudes an autumnal melancholy, which fits a story of characters whose abbreviated lives mean that they mourn their youth as they still live it. But Waititi, continuing a difficult run after Thor: Love and Thunder And The next goal winsdoesn’t so much adapt as he moves through the novel with the humorous and sentimental tone that he has established as his signature, and which has morphed in recent years into something mawkish and smug. He approaches Klara and the sun as someone who works with source material that needs improvement. The film’s opening act is filled with pratfalls involving the AFs at Klara’s store having to pose like working models in the window, while looking grimly at a store across the street in which new models strut their stuff like they’re on a runway show.
Waititi’s touchstone for his film appears to be Edward Scissorhandsup 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 it answers. Waititi is the opposite of a thorough world-builder, which can be a good quality – his gleeful contempt is what made his first Thor so enjoyable movie. But here it leads to something so rickety that it threatens to collapse before we even get to the rural home where Josie lives with her mother, Chrissie (Amy Adams), an interior designer. Josie, like most well-off children, has been subjected to a procedure called a facelift, which transforms the recipients she doesn’t kill into intellectually enhanced geniuses with the potential to rule the world. Unfortunately for Josie, her kidnapping didn’t go well, and while Chrissie hasn’t yet told her child she’s dying, she’s also acting like the girl is already gone. It’s a brutal role for Adams, made worse by the fact that Waititi feels the need to soften the character at the end, as if the truly horrible ways in which she behaves could be resolved with a line or two about grief that drives people crazy.
But no one is doing well except Ortega. Tharia, as Josie, and Aran Murphy, who plays her lover, the unraised boy next door Rick, appear as attractive children who exist in a brightly colored nightmare, reminiscent of Waititi’s gruesome World War II film. Jojo Rabbit. The great New Zealand actress Rachel House, as Chrissie’s governess, was responsible for providing a jarring comic note by playing a character openly angered by Klara’s arrival. Natasha Lyonne is simply great as the store manager where Klara comes from, while Steve Buscemi is oddly understated and scintillating for a mysterious character who comes up with something terrible in the name of never needing to grieve. No one is on the same page about the tone of the film. Waititi never picks one either, opting more often than not for a flippancy that treats key aspects of the plot, including Klara’s rudimentary faith, as something resembling a joke. Although Ortega doesn’t portray the character’s beliefs with the same disdain, what is supposed to be a great act of love and sacrifice nevertheless misses the mark, as if the entire film were coated in Teflon. They’ve probably developed better non-stick materials in the future, but until then this film, despite its pedigree, will also just be a blip in its star’s career.
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