A Valentine's Day movie with a difference, Jonze's speculative love story for the millennial generation is a charming, inventive and uniquely quirky take on romance in the not too distant future.
Spike Jonze's 'Her' pushes all the right buttons.
Her
- Director: Spike Jonze
- Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson, Olivia Wilde
Stanley Kubrick gave us HAL, the darkly menacing version of artificial intelligence who balefully sang Daisy, Daisy as his plug was pulled in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Jonze gives us the more enticing and sometimes too unbelievably human Samantha, the first generation of an operating system whose makers boast can think and act intuitively.
In this undated future in keeping with Jonze's optimistic take on things - a dappled sunlight-filled world of hipsters walking around with receivers in their ears talking to their devices - the perfectly named Theodore Twombly (Phoenix) is a lonely, lovelorn man on the cusp of becoming a divorcée. He works for a company composing handwritten letters for people too busy to express their feelings without the help of intermediaries. This is the world of the generation whose baby photos aren't in albums but on Instagram and Facebook, and whose relationship with the virtual world is often closer than with other people.
Theodore tries to make use of virtual opportunities for companionship and the alleviation of his loneliness but these leave him feeling emptier and more morose. It is not until Samantha (voiced by Johansson) enters his life that things begin to change, and gradually Theodore begins to fall for his operating system.
Perhaps it is too quirky for the Academy, but it seems a pity Phoenix was ignored in the acting category for his performance here. Wearing a moustache and glasses, and with not much beyond a voice in his ear and video screens to work with, he makes Theodore a sympathetic, complicated man who is trying to find something real in an increasingly unreal society.
If there's a flaw in Jonze's conceit it is that Johansson's Samantha moves too quickly from being an intuitive machine who sometimes comes up against her lack of tactile and emotional experience of human interaction to what amounts to the recorded version of a real woman.
For a director who has made his name in the conceptual heavy world of music videos and whose previous forays into feature films have sometimes overvalued their conceptual innovation at the expense of their characters, this is Jonze's most heartfelt human work. It's a love story like no other, and while it's about a man and his machine, it is also an empathetic, touching and completely relatable examination of universal themes we're all supposed to remember at this time of year.
- 'Her' opens at cinemas today
