An artificial friend can be exceptionally good at noticing what makes another person uncomfortable and still have a limited idea of what the discomfort means. That distinction drives Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. It gives a reader time to look at a household before finding the words for the ways its inhabitants have agreed to use each other. The film asks Jenna Ortega to make the distinction visible. As Klara, she can hold an expression long enough for attention to become an activity in itself. A movie built entirely on the patience of that look would be an interesting thing.
Mia Tharia’s Josie enters the arrangement with a considerably less stable future than Klara initially understands. The bond between them is attractive because there is a temporary symmetry in how much they want to be taken seriously. The household has reasons to think of Josie as fragile and of Klara as replaceable. For a while they can offer each other a reprieve from the assigned roles. Tharia gives that companionship a real texture when the writing allows Josie an impatient or ordinary reaction. The girl needs occasions to want something that has little to do with what the adults have already lost.
The practice of genetic enhancement provides a quiet account of how this household arrived at the relationship. The language for improving a child’s prospects can travel a long way from the child who will have to bear the physical cost. Klara is useful to the people in this world partly because her own future can be discussed in the same vocabulary of functions. There is a rich connection between the way parents buy advantages for children and the way they buy a friend for a girl to whom an advantage has done damage. The movie needs little explanation when it lets both transactions hover in the same room.
Amy Adams gives Josie’s mother Chris the strain of someone who makes decisions under a threat she cannot discuss honestly with everyone affected by them. The relationship with Klara brings out the sharpest possibility in the adaptation. It is possible to treat a companion tenderly and still believe her existence is conditional on being useful. What sounds like grief in one conversation can sound like a job description in the next. Adams is particularly well suited to the kind of courtesy that keeps those categories in contact. The movie sometimes cushions the encounter just when its ambiguities could make it hurt.
Klara’s relation to the sun is where the difficulty of adapting the book becomes visible. She can associate sunlight with nourishment and make of it an account of how she thinks care might operate. Ortega gives the idea a plain seriousness. The temptation is to make her belief immediately readable as a familiar human trait. The story gains something stranger when we can follow her attention and still be unsure whether faith is the right word for it. A warm picture of an artificial person discovering feeling has fewer consequences than a picture of real people arranging the terms on which they will recognize that feeling.
Aran Murphy’s Rick gives Josie a relationship with somebody who has a different standing in that system. A history of friendship can survive many things and still have to answer to the different futures the adults have made available to the two people in it. That pressure gives Tharia a chance to show how much of Josie’s position she actually understands. The best role for Klara in such an encounter is as somebody able to notice a withdrawal before the children can name its cause. The artificial friend can make the human characters’ acquired tact look like a very imperfect tool.
Waititi’s gift for making an outcast legible to an audience is useful to the first part of Klara’s story. It becomes a constraint as the larger decisions emerge. Some of the jokes and explanations give the audience permission to get ahead of the person through whom the story is being told. Ortega can suggest that there are things in the room she has detected and has yet to classify. It is more interesting to remain with her in that interval than to be brought up to speed by a film that has already decided what those things mean.
The human resemblance of Ortega’s performance is essential to the bargain the film makes with its audience. At the same time, there is something moving about Klara having to learn to interpret a look other people have been trained to give without thinking. The film can give her intelligence visible work to do if it leaves a little space after the look has been exchanged. Its more explanatory impulses are a particular loss in those passages. The predicament of a person who can attend closely and understand incompletely already belongs to the audience as well as to the robot.
