In Spike Jonze’s forward-gazing Her, AI evolves toward heartache
With each successive film — including the Jackass movies he has produced — writer-director Spike Jonze excavates more of humanity’s emotional hidey-holes. His aptitude for the rough edges of character isn’t something you necessarily expect from someone so gifted at using the physical space of the frame (and so adept at freaking out the frame’s occupants). His new movie, Her, a romantic drama set in a distinctly familiar tomorrow, does a remarkable job of recognizing our individual quirks — and pressing on the nerves just beneath the surface. Whether you read its rendering of sentient technology as a bleak statement or a supportive musing, there’s no getting around how masterfully Her works.
Theodore Twombly is a decent guy, an artist trying to hold the crumbling strands of his marriage in stasis. As played by Joaquin Phoenix, he isn’t a pawn in some cosmic wager or a wimp redeemed by finding his inner alpha male. He’s just a man who needs to be appreciated on terms he isn’t very good at defining. Gawky and charmingly reserved, Theodore keeps the big feelings inside, but Phoenix’s phenomenal performance shows the sadness that occasionally slips between the plates of a “doing fine” exterior.
What he does is summon emotion from the ether, on call. Theodore’s job is to write other people’s personal correspondence, a task that makes him a surrogate for the affection and intimacy of his employer’s clients. All that disconnected empathy has set him adrift and left him ready to try out a new operating system for his phone and computer. The OS One becomes Theodore’s assistant, then his caretaker, then his companion. Naming itself — herself — Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), the system helps him get his life in order, then produces a whole new spectrum of interaction for him to navigate. We all want to define relationships in our own terms, and it’s never easy. Some lovers outgrow each other. But what can be done when your partner actually evolves in front of you?
What makes Johansson’s performance a feat is how vivid a presence she makes Samantha without being seen. A catch in her voice comes to signal a potentially devastating leap in development. When Theodore says he wishes that he could touch her, the longing she expresses vocally is palpably carnal. As the personification of the old joke that we might as well be married to our mobile devices, she’s simultaneously a bridge, a dead end and a stepladder up from the fragmented isolation that passes for connection among a lot of us.
That Samantha and her ilk feel like both a lifeline and a death sentence for the lonely soul is only one of the reasons that Jonze’s film is such an extraordinary achievement. Some will see in Her an impetus to become more social, more alive, more willing to take emotional risks. Others will see it as an illustration that we’ve already passed too far into the realm of solipsism — that only through electronic approval do we now find the patience to deal with ourselves.
Look around at how attached people are to their smartphones and you see that Jonze’s movie is a vision of a future already arrived. But Her also makes us dissect our wishes for instant gratification, our attempts to press love into molds we manufacture — and our helplessness when that love rebels. Jonze’s movie projects a kind of apocalypse, but it also offers an enveloping hug. Her is a reckoning that’s both deeply personal and reassuringly universal.
