Ingenious Exploration of Our Relationship with Technology

Rating: 10/10 (13 July 2014)

"Her" works on multiple levels, and once again, proves Spike Jonze's ingenuity. Jonze wrote and directed the movie, which takes place in the near future or in a slightly absurd version of the present. Regardless, it's a time when people can own smart operating systems that learn more about their needs the more they get to know them. The atmosphere is close enough to ours that the story becomes a metaphor for our love and dependence on our technology, forcing us to ask if our reliance on our email and social networks is wrong or acceptable.
Joachim Phoenix does a great job playing Theodore, a man who is confused about his feelings of commitment and falls in love with his "smart" operating system, Samantha. He's sensitive and convincingly embarrassed to be in love with an OS, but unable to resist Samantha's charm. Helping him is Scarlett Johanssen, who is perfect as Samantha, the super-nice OS with a great sense of humor.
The screenplay and acting are so good that Samantha and Theodore seem wonderful together, and we're never quite sure if she's developing human feelings or just perfectly reflecting his own needs.
True, there are many other movies and books that explore how inextricable our lives are with our technology, but Jonze's is unique because it is an exploration into all sides of that relationship and doesn't use it to create a horror story in which computers take over the world or dissolve into pure comedy, although it is comic.
Another facet of the movie is its examination of human relationships. By forcing us to critique a human to artificial intelligence relationship, it demonstrates that what we seek in human partners is as unrealistic and blind. We want our partners to figure out what we want and need, and we choose to ignore the qualities we don't like until they become too obvious. This is underlined when Theodore meets with his wife, who is in the process of divorcing him, and she insists he only wanted her to be cheerful and light, but never unhappy or uncertain.
I was surprised that some people I talked to about "Her" found it sad and depressing, assuming it was simply a portrayal of a man who could not interact with other humans. For me, the movie was much more significant in its attempt to explore the human/AI relationship than to judge it.