A lovely, sensitive, grown-up romance that both benefits and suffers from its sci-fi bent.

Rating: 7/10 (16 January 2014)

Here's the thing: strictly speaking, we've all seen Her before, in some romantic comedy or other. Lonely, emotionally unavailable guy must learn how to truly open his heart as his marriage dissolves around him. He meets a girl he would never think to date in a million years - but, somehow, she changes him and his views on the world, love and romance. It's a tale as old as time.
The twist in Spike Jonze's love story for a new millennium? The girl in question has neither body nor face; she's an artificially intelligent operating system - think Siri v200.0 - who can grow, learn, evolve and, apparently, love. This twist is what sets Her apart - but also what creates an almost clinical detachment in the film that's tricky to process within the context of its narrative.
In a subtly distant future, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a loner subsisting on the periphery of human connection. He's undergoing a painful divorce from Catherine (Rooney Mara), his college sweetheart, and spends his days creating handwritten letters for other people. The last thing he expects to do is form a real emotional connection with his brand new operating system, who introduces herself as Samantha (voice of Scarlett Johansson). As she cleans up his e-mail inbox and sets up appointments for him, the two chat, banter and stumble blissfully into a relationship: one that eventually grows complicated with the encroaching weight of societal convention, expectations and metaphysics.
Bravely, Her is ultimately not about whether a human being and an operating system can fall in love. Within Jonze's sweetly fractured universe, the answer is obviously that they can. Once the first flush of infatuation fades away, Theodore and Samantha both fret about their unlikely and unconventional relationship. She even tries, in a disastrously awkward moment, to engage the services of Isabella, a willing sexual surrogate (Portia Doubleday), to better conform to the traditional expectations of romance that inevitably involve physical consummation. But these concerns arise precisely because their connection is so deep and so true, and it's played very respectfully as such.
In fact, it's played in so intensely straightforward a fashion that it can sometimes feel a little too forced. Several key emotional moments in the film tread a very, very fine line between poignant drama and unintended hilarity: when Theodore and Samantha first forge a sexual connection, for instance, or when Theodore struggles mightily with Samantha's sexual advances in the form of Isabella. At these points, Jonze's solution is to play it all completely straight. In effect, when showing us is not quite enough, he tells us that Theodore and Samantha's love exists and cannot be denied. This can make for a disconcerting experience as a viewer: in order for the film's central conceit to work, its most important relationship is played almost desperately as more than it amounts to on screen.
It's easy, too, to get nervous in the first third of the film about the premise for Theodore's relationship with Samantha: she's literally tailor-made for him and comes to life only when he plugs his ear-piece in. As Theodore wanders happily through his budding romance with this perfect girlfriend who's entirely at his beck and call, we start to get a deeper idea of just what went wrong in Theodore's marriage: somewhere along the way, Catherine stopped being the person he wanted her to be.
Her, as it turns out, is most effective in its exploration of the notions of self and personal growth in the context of love. The film cleverly uses its science-fiction - soon-to-be science-fact, for all we know - to convey the simplest of messages in the starkest of terms: loving someone is about accepting them for who they are, however messy, complicated and troublesome it might be. It's about watching them grow, and possibly growing away from you, but loving them anyway. In this respect, Samantha's evolution, from chipper daily planner to her own person with her own dreams and personality, is subtly and beautifully developed throughout.
Phoenix, as always, is wonderful. For very good reason, he's become one of the most interesting and reliably great actors of his generation: Theodore Twombly, of the almost determinedly fairy-tale name, is sweet, sensitive, and broken - a world away from the maniacally violent Freddie Quell in The Master. He strikes up remarkable chemistry with Mara, suggesting a wealth of history and heartbreak in a relationship that gets barely ten minutes of screen-time. There are a couple of great supporting turns as well from the eternally lovely Amy Adams (as Theodore's good friend Amy) and Chris Pratt (as Theodore's cheerfully open-minded colleague).
But the real star of the show is Johansson, who never once turns up on screen but nonetheless manages to forge an indelibly real character. In the husky, sweet, kittenish and everything-in-between cadences of Johansson's voice, Samantha blooms and blossoms. At the last minute, Johansson replaced Samantha Morton - who had already completed all her voice-work - in the role. It would certainly be interesting to see just how different the film would be with Morton in the part, but it's also impossible to imagine Her without Johansson.
On the surface, Her is a meditation on the technological advancements of the past decade and how they have led to an ever-growing proportion of the world's population living their lives on - and as defined by - the Internet. We can be friends with, effectively, disembodied voices: people from the other side of this globe that we might never meet in person. Jonze's film has gained its fair share of attention for being enormously topical and zeitgeist-y. But it's actually in Her's intelligent, sensitive treatment of the perils and lessons of love - part of the human condition since time immemorial - that it really resonates.