Let's be honest: who isn't in love with their computer?

Rating: 8/10 (12 July 2014)

From the trailer, I expected her to be a twee beta-male romance movie that would also act as a marker of our contemporary self-satisfied liberal consumerism. And it is all those things, but somehow it manages to be pretty good as well.
Her is the story of a lonely guy, played by a hipster-mustachioed Joaquin Phoenix, who falls in love with his artificially-intelligent operating system. From the opening scene, set in a business that writes "genuine hand-written letters" for other people, Her raises the question of how possible it is to form genuine human connections in a world full of artificial sentiment and consumable emotion? Rather than picturing the dystopia as a world of emotionless logic a la Orwell and Huxley, Spike Jonze imagines it as a world full of hollow feeling. In this setting, why not fall in love with your computer?
Her is a movie that's all about contemporary technology, but manages to avoid either condemning or praising it. Technology in Her is something that can replace human relationships, but something that can also enhance them and lead to new modes of being. The ending suggests that the world we are heading towards may be impossible to even comprehend using our contemporary modes of thought, let alone judge. Maybe our emotional attachments, the overwhelming life narratives we form out of primal lusts and similarly base emotion, are just a primitive phase in human evolution. These are questions that the film raises, but never offers a real solution to.
With that said, the genre of transformative romance is perhaps not the best metaphor for the coming technological singularity. This is one of those movies where women are defined entirely through their relationship with the male protagonist, and reflect little more than his own potential and development. As some critics have noted, it's a bit like 500 Days of Summer if Zooey Deschanal was an operating system. As such, the actual conversations and interactions between Theodore and Samantha are fairly dull.
When Her film gets away from its romantic framework, it becomes a lot more interesting -- perhaps even great. It reminded me frequently of Synecdoche, New York, with its shifts between surreal humour and broad but powerful philosophical inquiry. Her is also visually beautiful, and Jonze has done a great job imagining a future in which the aesthetics of Apple and Google have taken over the world. It's the kind of science- fiction which feels neither ridiculous nor generic, and for that Her deserves attention despite its flaws.