Her
Director: Spike Jonze
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams
Length: 126 minutes
Country: USA
“I want to know what love is, I want you to show me,” sang Foreigner in the 80s. Her also wants to know what love is. What is love, and what makes it real? Given its premise, Her is an oddly affecting piece of cinema. Handled badly, it could have been as glib and pointless as any other what-if science-fiction films like Click, or extremely camp like Weird Science. However, in the hands of writer-director Spike Jonze, what we have here is a wonderful film that moves you both emotionally and intellectually.
Joaquin Phoenix, channeling and expanding on the sad sack vibes of his role in The Master, plays Theodore Twombly, a professional love letter writer. Again this sounds like a gimmick, a huge signifier that shouts that we are in a movie about love, but thankfully the letters he writes are genuinely touching and not riddled with clichés like in Hitch. Suffering from an imminent divorce, he doesn’t go out much, and buys himself an Operating System that caters to all of his technological needs. She calls herself Samantha and has the ability to evolve and grow psychologically. Naturally, they fall in love, and the plot progresses from Theodore’s mixed feelings towards this. The voice work here by Scarlett Johansson is very convincing and it is easy to forget that Samantha is actually a computer.
The core concept is what makes this film incredibly relevant to our times. We do live in an age of simulated gratification, of an unlimited amount of Internet porn, sex dolls and Second Life. Like the best science fiction, it takes what we already have and simply turns up the stakes. The strangest place in the world for sex is probably Japan, where for a fee you can simply sleep next to a woman without having sex with her and where grown men actually have virtual Nintendo girlfriends. Given the world we already live in, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine falling in love with your O.S.
This is cinema at its most beautiful and moving.
As well as being concerned with the transient nature of love, Her shows the way technology, although obviously enriching our lives, leads us to disconnect as people. Set in a weird near future where everyone dresses in corduroy slacks and collarless shirts, cleverly using past designs to ground the future in a timeless aesthetic, this is obviously an allegory for our present age. I, like most of my friends, am addicted to my iPhone; the first thing I do in the morning is check my email in the vain belief that something interesting will come along. Nothing usually does. I lament the amount of times the opportunity for conversation with a stranger is offset by refreshing my twitter feed instead.
Amy Adams plays as Amy, Theodore’s close friend in a role I prefer and find in a weird way more attractive than her cleavage bearing turn in American Hustle. It’s always refreshing to see a film where men have female friends and don’t want to sleep with them. This is a decent way to demarcate the bad romantic comedies from the good ones, where the male and female characters actually talk rationally about how they feel to each other, and not for the sake of some contrived plot. The thoughtfulness of this production is amped up by the grainy-feel of the cinematography, which expertly captures Los Angeles as a high-rise utopia, and the excellent music, including the Oscar-nominated “Moon Song” by Karen O.
The best hope for an Academy Award will be the screenplay, which manages to be dialogue heavy yet maintain our interest. The newest addition to the canon of ‘new sincerity’, this film belongs alongside Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind and Synechdoche, New York as a film that bravely explores its themes without the need for irony. It is this braveness, and this willingness to try and find out what love is that makes Her a great love story. From the beginning monologue to the last visionary shot, this is cinema at its most beautiful and moving.
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