More powerful than you will imagine it could be

Rating: 10/10 (22 February 2015)

I knew this film was an Oscar nominee for best picture. I knew it had a top cast and crew. I am able to love sci-fi works. So I had "Her" down on my long list of "movies I want to see some day."
But even so, I had low expectations. Because I had heard that the premise was that "a man falls in love with his operating system." So I expected that this would be at best a piece of poignant comedic fluff. How much mileage can they possibly get out of that? I arrogantly asked myself. Isn't the Joaquin Phoenix character pretty much guaranteed to be the sort of nebbish we have seen in a lot of films, unable or afraid to handle a real relationship with a "real", that is, multicellular organic partner? And how did Scarlet Johanssen - an actress whom I respect terribly as well as have a major crush on, full disclosure, but still, how did she get award nominations for what is "just" voice- over work? Could this thing REALLY have been one of the best pictures of 2013? Wasn't that a fluke of some kind?
Well, if you are the person sitting in darkness who has not yet seen "Her" and is asking yourself these questions which I asked myself when I was sitting where you are now, I advise you that it is a much better, much more profound work with much deeper characters than you believe it can possibly be.
I am working very hard not to give away plot lines because I believe the wonder of seeing them unfold is part of the value of the work from which I don't intend to detract. But let me start off by saying that Twombley, the Joaquin Phoenix character, is a man in the last stages of a divorce who has been loved and in love and is not so damaged that he would fall in love with Siri. He works for a firm which apparently provides personal letters for other people - so his job is in fact to mirror, or simulate, in text the emotions which actual other people presumably feel or would like to have it believed that they feel. The parallels will not be lost on anyone, I am sure.
Twombley hears a commercial for a new kind of operating system - one that is not just an OS but "a consciousness." Thinking seriously about that for a moment, what does that mean? Twombley's ambition for his new purchase is to get his emails organized better, not to find someone new. Is a conscious OS "someone new," by the way? His OS is clearly really "intelligent" in the sense of being able to process information very quickly and *at least* simulate someone with an ego, wishes, emotions, etc., carrying on an audio conversation in real time. Thinking about it, even looking only at the office-assistant aspect, you might have doubts about letting your new just-out-of-the-box intelligent and powerful acquaintance, imbued with independent desires, read and instantly process the whole contents of your hard drives and cloud segments. To do it, you would have to be convinced that your new friend is benign and trustworthy, having only your interests at heart; but this is easier if the friend has Scarlet Johanssen's voice. (For a heterosexual guy anyway; what actors would voice-over the other versions? By the way, my question now is not why she was getting supporting actress nominations, but why they weren't nominations for the lead.)
If the caring-person nature of this new OS is an illusion, it's an illusion which is hard for Twombley and for us to penetrate. If it's not an illusion, isn't "a man falls in love with his OS" a one-sided depiction of the plot? What about the OS's side of things? The film takes us there very quickly. At one point, I remarked to my wife, "So - the promise of the film is that we will have operating systems that are as hard to deal with as human beings!" (Though as soon as I said that I realized that that boat may have already sailed with Windows 8 and Microsoft Office 2013.)
Although the film doesn't lose its focus on Twombley's point of view - indeed I don't recall Phoenix ever being off screen - Twombley is of course not the only purchaser of this OS, so we get artful glimpses of other people adapting to this technology in similar and different ways... This film is very thought-provoking, and when it's over you will be able to think of other films and TV episodes that have dealt with the same material. But it's also very moving. Love stories have happy and sad parts - and it's hard to mate for life like swans, unless you are both in fact, for example, swans.