Spike Jonze's feature-film career concerns pretty much about burrowing in, and messing up, his characters' heads. The human hard-drive the cerebrum is where all the secrets in the world, which is actually the secrets about ourselves, are stored: Being John Malkovich (1999) is a literal response to that perennial itch about being someone else; Adaptation (2002) brilliantly simulates the way a writer agonises over his thought process; Where The Wild Things Are (2009) takes place inside a boy's head. All of these films have a giddy, nebulous, childish quality, and they throw surreally hard questions at us with straight-faced frivolity.
Her is Jonze's first take at directing his own script, and this futuristic post-love story is his most emotionally adult film. More than in any of his previous movies, the airy feeling accented here by Hoyte Van Hoytema's autumn-glow cinematography carries poignant shades and unspoken memories of bitter times. The film looks as if it were sprinkled by fairy dust, but this fairy tale of a love between a human and a computer (sexual, as well as intellectual love) is not a hipsterish gimmick or a sardonic jab at our machine-dependent culture; it is a serious exploration into the possibility of human connection in the environment of disconnectedness, and into our evolving definition of what's real and what's artificial.
The man is Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix. In what looks like a near future, Theodore works in a candy-coloured office as a letter writer love letters, anniversary letters, condolence letters, dads' letters to sons, etc though in fact he doesn't "write" but dictates the content that is automatically transcribed into text by a machine. In fact, no one actually "writes" anything in this film (except in one single, crucial instance); instead, everyone talks, and like Theodore, many of them talk to themselves or to the computers, implying that such a high-tech mode of soliloquy is locking them inside their own heads.
Not shy, though not exactly assertive, Theodore is finalising a divorce from his wife (Roony Mara) after their distraught break-up. Meanwhile, we sense that he might have feelings for his neighbour, a married woman called Amy (Amy Adams). But the relationship at the centre of the film begins when Theodore buys a new computer that runs on an artificially intelligent OS and that speaks to him through the voice of a woman. She (the computer) calls herself Samantha, and she's voiced huskily, breathily by Scarlett Johansson. Starting off as his assistant, the attentive but disembodied Samantha soon becomes his confidante and girlfriend, and the long, exhilarating, light-hearted, sweet, hurtful conversations they have become a thoughtful study in verbal courtship.
The last thing Jonze would do is mock Theodore; the film's sincerity is apparent in its steadfast attempt to make the man-machine romance credible, even beautiful. Her is a study of the new world that is run by old emotions; in the post-everything life motored by technology, relationships remain the hardest code to crack, whether your intelligence is genuine or artificial. The evolution of computers far outpaces the evolution of our emotional capacity. One of the surprises is that Theodore isn't the only person who falls for his OS the film shows us that this intra-species romance is inevitable, and when that time comes and when we find ourselves in Theo's shoes, the same joy and bitterness we feel now in flesh-to-flesh relationships would still be there.
Movies about relationships between men and machines are often grim and dystopic, if not darkly satirical (a la The Stepford Wives). Her is special because it proposes real intimacy between the two, and because the film arrives at a time when society debates the growing distance among humans as we spend more time with technology. Phoenix's touching performance as Theodore highlights that point as he struggles to decide if his lingering heartache over his ex or the electrifying new love for Samantha is more real more real to him if not to everybody else. Is Theodore falling for a machine, a voice, an illusion, or an idea of a person? Come to think of it, that's the same question we ask ourselves right now. Her is set in the future, but its genius is the fact that it's a love story of our times.
