In an age where people love their iPhones, Spike Jonze and company only take that to its logical conclusion.
Her is the latest Spike Jonze film, and it’s set in an indeterminate time in the future. It could be fifty years ahead, or even a hundred. Maybe it’s only ten. Whatever the case, Her feels like a world only slightly removed from our own. Part of that comes from the setting of pristine Los Angeles, miles away from any suffering or poverty. Perhaps this is because something has happened, some sort of global course correction that has erased our connection to the past, to history. There’s no sense of legacy or history in Jonze’s Los Angeles, and I think that’s intentional. Somewhere along the line, we dove so deeply into technology that we can no longer remember the way out. The only reason people today don’t spend entire hours fiddling with their smart phones is one of necessity. We’re needed at work, we’re needed with friends. We are required via social contract to look each other in the eye. Her exists in the world where something has happened to shred that social contract. It’s not unbelievable.
Joaquin Phoenix is Theodore, a delicate wisp of a man in sneaky-stylish button-downs who reports to work every day transcribing others’ sentiments into hand-written letters. In his shaky, wounded timbre, Theodore describes decades-long love affairs between two people he’s never met, working only from notes and photos. There’s something funereal about this, as if he’s keeping alive the memory of two people long gone. The argument seems to be that society doesn’t miss the loss of sincerity and affection, because we’ve learned to re-create it so well already. Of course, that’s because of people like Theodore, the star of the office, who excels because he still knows what it’s like to be wounded, to feel. You know immediately where Jonze stands on the issue of whether we bleed makes us human or not.
Her is that rare movie that doesn’t mistreat loneliness and depression as something that can be healed by magical good vibes and the support of amusing supporting players (much like the one here played by a typically gregarious Chris Pratt). Theodore lives alone, but seems to be comfortably upper class. He runs his life through a robotic operating system that sorts out emails, arranges payments, and keeps life in order, while still making time for the people in his life like Amy (Amy Adams), a former flame turned sweet platonic friend. He’s more of a homebody, though he finds countless pleasures playing a 3D interactive video game, one that looks both suitably futuristic but also fairly contemporary. Tellingly in the future, it seems we’ve moved away from hyper-real games and back towards more cartoonish entertainments, like the “Perfect Mom” beta that Amy is working on where an over-tasked mother must complete ridiculous Herculean tasks in order to compete with the local mothers, tasks that usually involve improbable car stunts and inhumanly fast-forwarded menial jobs.
Unfortunately, Theodore is suffering from a messy divorce, one in which he refuses to cooperate because, as he puts it, “I like being married.” It’s also implied that recreating fond relationships all day leaves Theodore emotionally winded. To him, it’s a delight when the magical sprite inside one of his games curses him out. He later explains this character’s backstory, and it’s unclear whether he’s talking about the critter inside the game, or an actual controller behind the game itself. Clearly, he’s susceptible to the comforts of technology, which leads him to upgrade his operating system into a fully formed artificial intelligence, one that names itself Samantha. The most substantial personal information he gives is a single line about his relationship with his (unseen) mother, and suddenly Samantha is fully operational and catered to his every need.
As voiced by Scarlett Johansson, this system doesn’t even have an avatar, instead just floating in the ether, organizing Theodore’s life and needs with ease, occasionally laughing with him. It’s the “teacher, mother, secret lover” that Homer Simpson always saw in television, but now in computer form, and Theodore soon finds himself baring his deepest thoughts to her. Is this love or something else? Samantha makes Theodore feel important, and validates his feelings of loneliness and insecurity with laughter, kindness, and ultimately, sexual gratification. But Samantha is also programmed to do these things. As she attains a higher consciousness, the film flirts with familiar ideas about the evolution of A.I. Then again, we’re never entirely sure; perhaps this is just an ironic part of the wiring, and as Samantha is wowed by her own growing sensations, there is also a ceiling to how much she can understand?
There is something fairly unusual about how Joaquin Phoenix has been able to rebound from his prankish I’m Still Here into top roles with some of the great contemporary filmmakers. He was snake-like and fascinating in last year’s The Master and just recently revealed unique dimensions in James Gray’s The Immigrant the first of two New York Film Festival selections this year in which he featured (Her was the closing night premiere). Of course, suspicions aside, it’s a film lover’s delight that Phoenix has been rediscovered as one of the most intriguing, idiosyncratic leading men today. Playing Theodore, Phoenix is more outwardly sympathetic than his recent run of miscreants and troublemakers, and his traditional voice-cracking is so distilled that it sounds now like a heart breaking. There will be two types of people who love this movie. Some who Phoenix convinces he’s truly in love, soaring at the sound of Samantha’s voice, as the audience watches a broken man put himself together. Others will see the sadness in this lonely soul only being understood by a machine, unable to find solace with another human being.
One can view Jonze’s first film, Being John Malkovich, as something of a companion piece to his latest. That picture also wrestled with sci-fi concepts, presenting a person who has the ability to act as a vessel for others in order to achieve eternal life, and in the short term, give their life a superficial meaning. Employing someone else as a puppet, as the characters do to Malkovich in that movie, is no more a brand new concept than the thought of self-operating systems gaining sentience as they do in Her. And yet, both are used to comment on contemporary life in ways unprecedented, to the point where both transcend their genre trappings. Her is essentially a Terminator prequel, though no one would ever say such a thing, and that’s because the human element overwhelms enough that when we’ve reached a logical thematic conclusion (that the majority of the public is doing exactly what Theodore is, and therefore is probably just as lonely), it still comes as a surprise. Especially considering one could say the same about modern life as well.
Den of Geek Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars