Written and directed by Spike Jonze, Her combines the eccentricity of his previous works Being John Malkovich and Adaptation—along with the unbridled sincerity and emotional heft of his Where the Wild Things Are—into a transcendent story set in the familiar near future in which a man falls in love with his computer.
That high concept plot alone threatens to undermine itself as laughable, unrelatable and discomforting, but is handled with such careful consideration that Her is anything but. Joaquin Phoenix is Theodore Twombley, a writer of sorts—he sits in a cubicle and writes hired-out letters to other peoples’ loved ones—who fills his lonely existence with video games, late night chat rooms and putting off signing his divorce papers. Then he half-heartedly purchases the latest operating system, the first true Artificial Intelligence, called OS1. Effortlessly voiced by Scarlett Johansson, the new OS impresses Theo with its natural, conversational speech (most computer interfacing is handled through a small, single, wireless earbud) and its ability to intuit what Theo needs. It names itself Samantha. Theo likes Samantha.
The film itself seems to intuit and address the “creepiness curve” through both its stunning pastel and rose petal production design that eschews flashy futurism for an intelligent and organic depiction of technology-integrated life, and its anchored-by-humanity storytelling. Theodore walks to work talking to apparently no one, as does every one he passes. But like noses deep in smartphones at restaurants, in checkout lines, on the couch, the weird factor quickly gives way to normalcy. As Samantha and Theo’s relationship grows and changes, so to does the audience’s relationship with the movie, and eventually Samantha feels no less real than Theo, no less real than his neighbor Amy (Amy Adams, playing the mousy opposite of her role in American Hustle, is equally good here), and no less real than the slightly put-on (or is it naive) optimism of his boss, Paul (another successful turn for Chris Pratt).
With deft sleight-of-hand and without passing judgement, Spike Jonze’s Her reveals itself to be more than just a weird tale of a man falling in love with an OS, but a prescient, unsettling, and funny vision of our human relationship with technology, and perhaps more important (and surprising), a poignant story about human relationships.
