Another Cerebral Masterpiece from Spike Jonze

Rating: 9/10 (31 January 2014)

Spike Jonze's Her is a triumph in every sense of the word. Its acting, direction, script, and cinematography are spot-on. There are not enough superlatives to be thrown at this film.
Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a divorcée who holes up in his apartment and is generally anti-social. He has a few friends, including the unhappily-married Amy (Amy Adams), an old flame. His love life consists of visiting chat rooms and having phone sex with strangers.
One day, he sees an ad for a new operating system, which is custom- designed for each owner. Upon purchasing it, the program builds him Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Theodore spends the majority of the film revealing himself to Samantha, and she to him, as she has been programmed to evolve and become more self-aware.
Samantha, for Theodore, is the perfect woman: intelligent (capable of reading books in hundredths of a second), funny, caring, and a good listener. They begin a romantic relationship, complete with sex (the phone sex idea comes back into play here). We see the ups and downs of their relationship. Outsiders are generally either confused by the possibility of a romance with an operating system, or strangely accepting.
Jonze uses Her to make salient points about the way humans communicate in an increasingly technological world. Future generations will consider this decade a milestone in cinema for already giving us two films that deal directly with this issue, the other being David Fincher's The Social Network. Her stays true to its billing, though—it is, first and foremost, a romance, one that doesn't shy away from the shaky patches in any relationship. In that regard, it is similarly painful and powerful as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
This is heady cinema, anchored by mainstream actors and a deceptively simple plot. Layers upon layers of subtext lay within. I believe there to be a streak of gay-marriage metaphors at work, but I could always just be reading that into the film. It is, however, very of-the-moment, a futuristic tale that could be set in 2014. Simply put, it's a new classic.