After I recovered from a brief illness from some bug I caught at jury duty that kept me home on Friday, my sweetie-wife and I attended a screening of Klara and the Sun on Sunday morning.
Sony/Columbia Pictures
Adapted from a novel by prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, who penned the novel that was the source material for one of my favorite films, The Remains of the Day, and adapted to the screen by Kiwi filmmaker Taika Waititi and co-scripter Dahvi Waller, Klara and the Sun is the story of an artificial friend, Klara (Jenna Ortega), a humanoid robot that is purchased as a companion for an ill teenager, Josie (Mia Tharia). Klara, who has never experienced anything beyond the confines of the retail store, has a childlike understanding of the larger world and believes the sun to be a magical being with healing powers. Josie’s home is a broken one, her father having left after the death of Josie’s older sister, and her mother (Amy Adams) still harboring secrets and unresolved grief that are exacerbated by Josie’s serious illness, an illness that is an adverse event from Josie being “lifted,” that is, genetically manipulated into superior academic ability. Klara attempts to navigate a world that she doesn’t understand, Josie’s illness, the housekeeper’s suspicions, and the secret plot hiding at the heart of the shattered family while growing beyond the confines of her programming.
Waititi is a filmmaker known for an energetic and somewhat chaotic style of cinema. His first entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor: Ragnarok, shook that franchise free from the staid and neo-Shakespearean style in favor of something more akin to the wild and psychedelic art of Jack Kirby. His adaptation of Caging Skies into the dramatic comedy Jojo Rabbit, where Waititi himself played the young protagonist’s imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler, won both critical and popular praise but again leaned heavily into wild absurdist humor that served as a contrast to the darker story of a young boy enraptured by Nazi ideology and his process of breaking free from it. Klara and the Sun required a lighter touch than Waititi typically employs, and he managed it.
I have read only one novel by Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, and while the writing is absolutely brilliant, I have no memory of the text being particularly funny. It is a tragic tale of a man so bound by his sense of duty that he puts everything else aside, including family and his own chance at real happiness, to perform services that are mostly taken for granted. I suspect that the novel Klara and the Sun is equally humor-free, and expecting Waititi to craft a feature film free of humor would be asking too much. Waititi managed to find a balance between his own wild sense of humor and the needs of this particular project.
Cinematographer Mike Berlucchi captures Klara’s wondrous rapture with the sun quite well, giving us magical moments at sunrises and sunsets, even finding those fleeting moments in the middle of an urban landscape when the sun can still bring life to the tired.
Klara and the Sun is a charming and sentimental film that never stumbles into being maudlin, one that reminds us that there is magic in life if only we would look for it with the right eyes.
