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 (010314)
A man sits in a sleek, rainbow-hued modern office, dictating a love letter into
his computer. At first, the sincere, impassioned words he’s speaking appear to
be part of an intended mash note to his beloved. Then we start to notice that a
few of the details are off—how could this thirty-something guy be celebrating a
golden wedding anniversary? And why is he referring to his younger self as “the
girl I was”? The camera pulls back to reveal a roomful of office workers, all
dictating similarly heartfelt missives as a phone rings and is answered:
“Beautifuhandwrittenletters.com. Please hold.” In a few swift, witty strokes,
Spike Jonze, the writer and director of the ravishing new film Her, has
established an ever-so-slightly futuristic world, one in which human intimacy is
routinely outsourced to professional letter-writers who do the caring,
remembering, confessing, and pining for you. That beautifully economical first
scene makes you laugh even as it sets up the question that Her will investigate
with a philosophical ambition rare in contemporary cinematic sci-fi: How are
human beings changing as a result of, and in concert with, technology?
As we soon learn, the letter-writer, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a
lonely, socially awkward sort, separated for nearly a year from his wife,
Catherine (Rooney Mara), but unable to bring himself to sign the divorce papers.
He lives in a high-rise apartment in a Los Angeles that, once again, seems just
slightly off from the version of the city we know, a little bigger and shinier
and more sterile (many of the film’s exteriors were shot in a district of
Shanghai). After work in the evenings, Theodore plays interactive video games
that are a shade more immersive than those currently in existence but that
nonetheless leave him feeling empty and unfulfilled. That is, until the night
Theodore brings home the OS1, a new computer operating system that he’s seen
touted (in a curiously apocalyptic ad campaign) as the first artificially
intelligent system of its kind. When Theodore boots up the new system and
answers a few preliminary questions, a strange thing happens: a female voice
(that of Scarlett Johansson) comes online, speaking into Theodore’s wireless
earpiece with a spontaneity and naturalness that belies her digital origin.
After scanning a book of names in a fraction of a second, she chooses her own
name, “Samantha,” and sets about organizing Theodore’s inbox with as much
empathy as efficiency, even laughing at the jokes she comes across in his old
emails.
Over the next few weeks, Theodore, bemused by the verisimilitude of this new
technology,
begins to test the limits of his new operating system (or is she testing his?).
They engage in long, searching late-night conversations and excursions around
the city with a monitor propped in Theodore’s pocket, camera side out, so that
Samantha can “see” the places they’re exploring. With dizzying rapidity, the man
and his operating system find themselves falling in love—and starting to accept,
along with the audience, the notion that having a body isn’t a necessary
prerequisite to having a relationship.
I won’t reveal too much about where Samantha and Theodore’s story goes from
there, because it’s after the high-concept premise has come to feel natural that
Her really takes off. But soon we start to notice that Theodore isn’t the only
one palling around with a nonphysical entity: His best friend Amy (Amy Adams), a
video-game designer and aspiring filmmaker who’s also recently separated,
regards her female-voiced OS as a dear friend and sits up giggling with her late
into the night. Everywhere Theodore looks, he sees people engaged in thoughtful
colloquy with unseen interlocutors. But are humans and human-designed artificial
intelligences capable of engaging in a real relationship? Samantha experiments
with inviting a human sex surrogate to stand in for her in a physical encounter
with her beloved, with humiliating results all around. Later, as Samantha’s
consciousness begins to evolve and grow—remember, this is a woman, or entity,
who can master whole fields of human knowledge in a matter of seconds—Theodore
starts to feel jealous of her vast circle of invisible virtual friends, who
include an AI reconstruction of the consciousness of the late Zen philosopher
Alan Watts (a hilariously intimidating romantic rival if there ever was one).
“Am I in this because I’m not strong enough for a real relationship?” Theodore
asks Amy while going through a rough patch with his invisible digital
girlfriend. “Is it not real?” she replies. He doesn’t have a ready answer, and
neither does the movie. It’s one of Her’s great strengths that it’s neither
dystopian nor utopian in its vision of the coming singularity (the writer Ray
Kurzweil’s term for an imagined future in which technology will have achieved
consciousness). In the first hour especially, there are many well-chosen details
that satirize our growing dependence on gadgets to enhance moment-to-moment
lived experience. But just when you think someone is about to deliver a Luddite
encomium to the primacy of the human, Jonze will pivot to a romantic scene
between Samantha and Theodore that genuinely seems to be taking place between
two flawed, headstrong lovers.
Phoenix is at his best in parts that require an absolute, almost insane
commitment to reacting to the moment, whether it’s the unbalanced cult member of
The Master or a self-destructive fictionalized version of himself in the hoax
documentary I’m Still Here. Yet despite his signature intensity, Phoenix is
blessedly free of the self-aggrandizing macho force field that seems to surround
many “serious” male actors of his age. He’s alone on screen for great swaths of
the film, interacting intensely with an off-screen voice, yet the performance
never feels showy or solipsistic. Phoenix also gets the rare-for-him chance to
play comedy; his Theodore is a hardworking, lonely, but doggedly optimistic
schlemiel who sometimes recalls Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter in Billy Wilder’s The
Apartment.
Like 2001: A Space Odyssey’s first menacing, then pitiable HAL 9000, Samantha
also emerges over the course of the film as a complex character, thanks in large
part to Scarlett Johansson’s scratchy, velvety, irreducibly human-sounding
voice. Though we never catch a glimpse of her well-known movie-star face or
body, Johansson gives a remarkably vibrant performance—albeit one that’s
supported by another, invisible performance that must also have been a doozy.
Initially, Samantha Morton was cast as the operating system, so during shooting,
it was her line readings that Phoenix was responding to. Later, Jonze decided to
replace Morton’s voice on the soundtrack with Johansson’s, layering the two
performances on top of each other. It’s the perfect production-history hiccup
for a film about the technological supplementation of identity and the
replaceability (and irreplaceability) of the beloved.
Her is a remarkably ingenious film but, more important, it is a film that
transcends its own ingenuity to achieve something akin to wisdom. By turns sad,
funny, optimistic, and flat-out weird, it is a work of sincere and forceful
humanism. Taken in conjunction with Jonze’s prior oeuvre—and in particular his
misunderstood 2009 masterpiece
Where the Wild Things Are—it establishes him firmly in the very top tier of
filmmakers working today. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—of which
Her is a clear descendant—Jonze’s film uses the tools of lightly scienced
fiction to pose questions of genuine emotional and philosophical weight. What
makes love real: the lover, the loved one, or the means by which love is
conveyed? Need it be all three? Jonze has crafted a movie that’s part dark
satire, part metaphysical comedy, part bittersweet romance, part brain-bending
sci-fi fable. “Her” can be complex if you want explore its many subtextual
layers about the coexistence of life and tech. But appeals to the head and heart
with equal measure. It also can be simple and effective, a movie about what
brings us together, and how we drift apart.
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