Spike Jonze gives us a lot more than a romantic comedy!

Rating: 9/10 (25 May 2014)

"Her" is a very rich and profound romantic sci-fi comedy about a lonely man whose job is to write love letters for other lonely souls yet finds himself 'involved' with the advanced operating system he's purchased to run his life. Writer-director Spike Jonze has taken this idea, miraculously mated Frank Capra with Franz Kafka sans cynicism, and turned out a gem of a film that is much more than a social critique of how much electronics has taken over our lives. It's really about human relationships.
A viewer can be forgiven for thinking on first viewing that Spike Jonze's "Her" is mainly about our socio-political obsession with technology and the advantages and disadvantages of falling in love with a computerized non-human. In fact, neither of these is the film's most important subject. In relating the main character's 'romantic' entanglement with an operating system, the film actually functions -- in accurate psychological detail -- as a dissection of a real human relationship, as it proceeds -- almost clinically -- through each of its stages, from initial excitement at meeting the other, the honeymoon, the jealous stage, the gradual disillusionment, and the breakup. Like "Vertigo", "Shame", "Titanic" and "Rain Man", "Her" is one of those movies that contains, underneath its surface, a charting of the development of a damaged human being out of a private prison of impotence or enslavement towards liberation, and the possibility of a healthy human relationship. In fact, its veneer of light entertainment deceptively misdirects one away from its serious human subject.
The lonely writer Theodore is locked in his protective world from the beginning of the film perfectly at home with releasing the romantic feelings of which he has denied himself through his job by writing love letters for strangers to send to their own (perhaps superficial) lovers. And throughout the film he is seen peering at the outside world from high apartments through windows, the pane of glass symbolizing the barrier that prevents him from intimate human contact.
The world Theodore is living in (and we, as well) is a world in which technology has gone beyond convenience to have become monstrous methods of escape as well as permanent alienation from direct human face-to-face interaction. Throughout the film we follow Theodore as he struts and spins through malls and various physical spaces, talking only to his operating system, focused on his cellphone and the other devices that bring 'her' to him, living only in an obsessive romantic relationship with the 'being' with whom or what he has become infatuated.
At the end of the film, after journeyed through the different steps in his relationship with 'Samantha' to the point he is 'dumped' by 'her', he has progressed into standing up straight on the roof of the high office building, finally without glass windows or any obstacle to separate him from the open world, signifying his own victorious emerging out of his prison. Like John Ferguson at the end of Hitchcock's "Vertigo", Theodore is now at the beginning of his being able to approach a real intimacy with a real human being -- not an idealistic fantasy or a computerized pseudo-human.
Although centering on a male falling in love with an artificial 'her', the film also contains, as a secondary story that we must fill in ourselves, a female becoming 'intimate' with an artificial 'her' in the character of Amy who apparently goes through a similar experience as Theodore. At the end of the film we find both the male and female sitting on the rooftop together, good friends for life (plainly platonic not romantic), both looking out over the world in front of them without physical barriers, ready for the beginning of human love with some 'other', without psychological barriers.
One could build a case for 'Samantha' being ultimately Theodore's true therapist, for the growth 'she' gently leads him through in the film's narrative is virtually identical in its stages to what a real therapist does, but in a more personal and direct way.
Ironically, while this film began as a picture of a destructive society controlled by a technology that impedes human contact, the end of this film shows -- after 'Samantha' has gently mentored Theodore (and us) into a world of healthy human intimacy -- it to be a film of hope. 'Samantha' has seemingly advanced to such a level that 'she' is able to see the problems of the technological society 'she' was 'born' into, and to ingeniously work out a viable type of therapy that will begin to cure the Theodores and the Amys of our problematic society.