Her is as talky and complex as any film scripted by his erstwhile partner Charlie Kaufman. However, neither I’m Here nor even Being John Malkovich has quite the sophistication Jonze shows in this, his first sole feature screenplay credit. His heart-meltingly cute short film I’m Here (2010 homepage), for instance, relates how an automaton librarian meets a risk-taking female automaton so prone to breaking bits of herself that he donates all his body parts to her except for his head, which ends up cradled in her lap.
The body-brain divide in particular is a clear Jonze theme. There’s nothing like the built-in noir damnation between humans and replicants of, say, Blade Runner (1982). Jonze and his actors go all out to make the relationship seem real. Instead, the film takes its romance as seriously as it does its insights into the way we use electronic media and what it’s doing to us. Yet Her is not often comedic in this way – though it has fun with the idea of taking your OS out with another couple and them having precisely the conversations with her they would have had with a ‘real’ partner.
In that sense you could relate it to certain classic Hollywood comedy ideas: James Stewart’s invisible rabbit friend in Harvey (1950), or Lily Tomlin co-habiting Steve Martin’s brain in All of Me (1984), or the voice of Emma Thompson’s ‘life narrator’ in the head of Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction (2006), or even, at a small stretch, John Cusack’s experience in Jonze’s own Being John Malkovich (1999). In other words, Her is an unapologetic modern love story, except that one half of the couple remains invisible and is not ‘real’. But virtual sex isn’t enough for her, so she finds a sympathetic woman to act as her physical avatar, although this creeps Theodore out and so he withdraws from Samantha for a while, but not for long. Theodore is soon enraptured by her, and she seems to want to gorge on real human experience. (When you hear her, you may want one too.) ‘Samantha’ does not come on as an artificial intelligence but as a breathily fascinating and fascinated fantasy partner-in-life. It really nails how different personal messaging through the internet is from any other form of human discourse. This part of the film feels breathtakingly authentic. Immediately curious about every aspect of Theodore’s routine life, she craves intimacy as much as he does. His OS is called Samantha and has the voice of Scarlett Johansson. When he hears about a new operating system that offers an intuitive virtual companion, he buys one and dons the earpiece and dot camera that will change his life. He’s more the sensitive metrosexual that many advertisers would like more men to be.
Theodore, as Phoenix plays him, does not, however, seem like a creep. This I take to be one of the key ideas of the film, that the instant intimacy of social media is turning us all into creeps. When Theodore won’t commit to seriousness, his date switches on a dime from enthusiasm to vitriol: “You’re a very creepy person,” she tells him. Into a single date he and she cram the whole cycle of meet, drink, get friendly, flirt, cop off, argue and break up. (One wonders if he’s named after the late painter Cy Twombly, since the tones of pale yellow, magnolia and peach he favours also feature in some of the artist’s paintings.)įinding it hard to hide his melancholy even from the feisty 3D game avatars he toys with, Theodore thinks about computer dating and, encouraged by his old friend Amy ( Amy Adams) and her partner, he hooks up with a woman they help him to choose. Not least in that vogue is our initially sad protagonist Theodore Twombly ( Joaquin Phoenix), a man whose present irony is that he writes sensitive, tonally perfect letters of affection on behalf of his employers’ clients (the company is like a florist without flowers) while suffering the throes of a break-up from his beloved wife Catherine ( Rooney Mara), who has filed for divorce. Everyone in this film is frighteningly well groomed and dressed smart-casual in pastel-toned, comforting loose clothes that have just a hint of children’s wear about them. Rather it’s a commendation that this film’s dystopia has a plausibly fluffy emotion-stroking feel to it, which is of a piece with contemporary striving to have it all while looking like you’re not trying too hard. This is not a criticism – and certainly not a hint about where and how Jonze earned his directorial chops. Produced by Megan Ellison, Spike Jonze, Vincent Landayĭirector of Photography Hoyte van Hoytemaĭistributor Entertainment Film Distributors Ltd
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