After finishing my first screening of Spike Jonze new film Her, I felt very effected, almost devastated. I don't mean devastated as in crestfallen or depressed, because Her is not a depressing film, I only mean emotionally present. Her, like Adaptation, confirms for me that Spike Jonze is a blossoming master, someone that can speak to my heart and my head at the same time, exciting both and making neither secondary.
First, the film is beautiful, imagining a utopian, idealized future. Skyscrapers are everywhere in this future, with immaculate gardens and reflecting pools everywhere, an upper-middle class urban heaven. Big brother is never mentioned, though the ways in which society in the film has allowed the digital encroach on the social would seem to invite comparisons to Orwell's dystopia of 1984. This film isn't about that, this film is about love.
As the film opens, Theodore Twembly (Joaquin Phoenix) sits at his desk writing love notes for other people, a perfect job for the romantic sad sack that he is. His fortunes in love soon change, however, when he buys the newest operating system, which after asking him some basic questions, gives itself the name Samantha and Scarlett Johanson's sexy voice, causing him to fall madly in love with it.
This could be a joke, a gag played for laughs, but we understand. In what is perhaps the film's greatest trick, I stopped thinking of her as an operating system, but as a person like any other. The film is populated with compelling and entertaining characters and performances. Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, and Amy Adams all turn in very nice supporting performances, but it's it's Phoenix's show, and his emotions are raw and real.
The relationship between Theodore and Samantha is the film's focus, and it has ups, downs, complexities and complications ad naseum, just like a real relationship. Scarlett Johanson's Samantha is fantastically sensitive, imaginative, and sexy. Despite the fact that it is a computer, and thus has no true personality, Theodore falls in love with it, and so did I.
