Wonderful and sad

Rating: 8/10 (17 June 2014)

Not content with toying with our pre-quirky/ironic film-making preconceptions of how a movie should play out with the mind-blowing Being John Malkovich (1999), or going all-out self-reflexive with a blocked writer in Adaptation (2002), former music video director and Jackass co-creator Spike Jonze spins the traditional movie romance on it's head with Her. Set in a very believable near-future, it's the story of a lonely man who falls in love with a computer voice. It is the stuff of sci-fi and clever-clever satire. Or so you would think. Her, even with the absence of a physical female lead, may just be one of the most honest and heart-warming romances in recent memory.
Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) writes love letters to husbands, wives, sons, daughters and any others loved ones that require his services. He spends his life in front of a computer verbally dictating his achingly romantic letters for BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, a service for people who want to vocalise their love but have no way to express it. Theodore is the best at his job, yet in the real world, he finds himself pining for his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rooney Mara), and chatting with strangers late at night on sex lines. He goes on a disastrous date with a beautiful woman (Olivia Wilde), but seems unable to connect with anyone in the real world.
When he hears about an innovation in technology, called OS, which activates an artificial voice that can organise your life, answer your questions, or simply be your best friend, Theodore gets Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), who quickly evolves to develop an adorable personality of her own. Soon enough, Theodore finds himself falling for her, and she for him, as they connect solely through an earpiece in Theodore's ear. It's a fad that quickly catches on, and people are soon falling for OS's throughout the country.
It sounds like the stuff of Orwellian satire, but there's no post- apocalyptic landscapes, no government agents watching through holes in the wall, and certainly no flying machines. The future of Her is nigh on utopian; the streets are spotless, the people happy, and no signs of class divide or social disorder of any kind. The film could easily have become another analysis of the dangers of technology and how we would rather send a text message than look someone in the face. The whole thing sounds gimmicky, a horror film about the rise of the iEverything, but this is as human a love story can be, even if the other half is the husky, wonderful voice of Scarlett Johansson. Her shows the joys of technology as much as the darker side.
It's Johansson's vocal performance that really allows the film to work, meaning that it's not just about a weird guy who gets off by talking to a computer. She does the incredible trick of making her a three dimensional character. It seems natural that a lonely guy like Theodore would fall for her, and Phoenix, sporting an unflattering moustache, capitalises on his staggering beast-in-a-cage performance in The Master (2012) - a film he should have beaten Day-Lewis to the Best Actor Oscar for - with another knockout performance. He's incredibly subtle, capturing more in a mumbled line than any Oscar-baiting monologue could. He's a heart-breakingly lonely soul, and when things inevitably get a bit difficult for the human/cyber couple, you really ache for him.
Her doesn't go down the route of Theodore craving human contact - the film is more complex than that. Samantha, with her infinite capacity to evolve, struggles to understand her own existence. It doesn't get bogged down with existential waffle, so we get to witness Samantha's child-like confusion and instinct to see and learn everything. Along with work friend Paul (Chris Pratt) and his recently separated best friend Amy (Amy Adams) (who both have love stories of their own), Theodore learns what it's like to love, and all the soul-breaking pain that comes with it. Her is wonderful and sad: a love story that even the most heart- hearted singletons living in this touch-screen world would find hard not to relate to.