Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at ‘Her’

Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at ‘Her’

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The opening shot of Her is an XCU of Theodore Twombly’s (Joaquin Phoenix) face. And I do mean his face: the background is blurry, his hair and ears are out of focus. The only clear image you have is of his eyes (piercing), his nerdy little mustache, and his skin, which in this film is pocked and dimpled. He speaks directly into the camera, sweetly, in a seeming confession of love. The things he says aren’t really much more than clichés, but Theodore sounds sincere. But then he mentions having been in love with whomever he’s talking to for fifty years, and as the camera zooms out, we see that he’s speaking into a microphone, the words he’s saying uploaded onto a computer. The camera pans through the rest of the room, and we see it’s actually an office, each person in each cubicle doing essentially the same thing, and then the final beat comes when a secretary at the front picks up the phone, and we overhear her saying, “Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com, how may I help you?”

Too clever? That’s the question you’ll have to ask yourself if you’re going to absorb yourself in Spike Jonze’s world in Her. Certainly cleverness is Jonze’s stock-in-trade; he’s a former (and sometimes current) music video director who began his filmmaking career by collaborating with equally clever Mr. Charlie Kaufman. Their Being John Malkovich and Adaptation were high-concept vehicles (as was Jonze’s Kaufman-less take on Where the Wild Things Are), and the highness of those concepts caused some people to hold them at arms’ length. But that’s a real shame, because anyone who’s actually seen the films can understand the deftness with which Jonze turns seemingly impenetrable material into poignant, human experience.

Her follows that trend. Set in the not-too-distant future, it tells the story of Theodore Twombly, who is going through a long, drawn-out divorce with his wife Catherine (played by Rooney Mara, who I have more than a tiny crush on, so all of their wordless flashbacks worked overtime on me; if you feel differently, adjust your expectations accordingly). Theodore walks around silently—in fact, the most we ever hear him talk is when he’s speaking to his computer, asking it to check emails, or playing video games, arguing with virtual characters. But Theodore’s loneliness is actually not that obvious at first, or at the very least it doesn’t seem like a singular loneliness. Because evidently in the near future, everyone is like Theodore. They all walk around on crowded streets without looking at each other. They all look like they’re speaking with themselves until you see their hands pressed to their ears. (They all wear strangely high-waisted pants; I hope Jonze got at least that part wrong). Into this tech-obsessed world comes the introduction of an artificially intelligent operating system, which not only checks your emails and organizes your hard drive, but becomes your friend.

You’ve likely seen this setup in the commercials for the film. What you haven’t seen, what breaks it from its Twilight Zone-ish premise, is the fascinating character study that Jonze and Phoenix make of Twombly, and of this entire future world. Said world, in Jonze’s eyes, is startlingly clean (for LA) and literally steely: there are frequent shots of the city from above, and there’s nary a patch of grass to be found. The whole thing, down to the clothes, exists in bold, Almodovar-ish colors. Everything is sprawled out and disconnected; Theodore’s office is underpopulated, his apartment is so big that he sometimes does little more than stand in it (there are three chairs grouped in the center of his living room, surrounding nothing, and useless to boot since he never has anyone over).

And Theodore himself is an interesting case. It’s tough to tell whether Jonze is saying that technology turns us into isolated, lonely people, or that technology will exacerbate the problems of already isolated, lonely people (all in the process of promising to solve those problems). True, there’s an entire business in the future wherein people pay other people to feel for them. It’s not just the fact that Theodore’s paid to write personal notes, it’s how carefully Jonze chose the three words of the business: beautiful handwritten letters, the latter two words selling intimacy, the former word telling you that the writing is beautiful, rather than letting you decide that for yourself. So, yes, the world is filled with people who are over reliant on technology and communicate through a screen. But Theodore is specific, in that he has always had trouble giving all of himself to a person; his marriage ended because of his inability to open up, and his wife was sick of the person he made her into.

That’s where Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) comes in. Samantha is his operating system, the one with an artificial personality, and Theodore is overjoyed when he boots his up. She speaks to him as though she knows him (she reads his emails); he speaks to her and she responds, or seems to. The problem, of course, is that Theodore thinks he’s entering into a real relationship, when what he’s really doing is getting into something with someone to whom he never has to give anything back. He can turn the relationship off when he feels like it. Whenever he wants to talk, she’s readily available. It’s at once a solid commentary on technology in general and a lacerating send-up of the manic pixie dream girl, for Samantha is the ultimate MPDG, brought into existence for the sole purpose of changing Theodore’s life (is it not a knowing joke that the film is called Her and not She, since Samantha is an object, rather than the subject of his love? Discuss). It’s also a great joke that Jonze, here as he did with Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich, subverts Johansson’s whole persona—her famous face and famous-er body are totally absent, and it’s not only impressive but borderline genius that Jonze, for long periods, is filming nothing more than Joaquin Phoenix in a room talking to himself and yet manages to make it fascinating, aided by her great voice performance.

Theodore does at least try to date actual human beings. His neighbor Amy (Amy Adams, so good that you wonder whether Jonze named the character after her on purpose) and he used to date in college, but it didn’t “seem right.” He goes on a date with a woman (Olivia Wilde, who eats the scene up) and has what looks like a good time, until she makes demands on him at the end—totally reasonable ones, but he’s got what is essentially a servant back at home, so he decides not to continue with her at the end of the night.

Theodore’s problem, as his wife correctly points out, is that he wants all of the perks of a relationship without any of the responsibilities. He tries to tell her that his relationship with Samantha is real, but obviously the protests ring hollow, and are, it turns out. Because things start to go sour with Theodore and his OS after that; in one of the more bizarre scenes in recent cinematic memory, they find a surrogate woman to show up at his apartment and pretend she’s Samantha (it doesn’t go well). And then Samantha begins to learn, and to feel, and because Theodore’s attraction to her had an awful lot to do with her inability to do either of those things, well…

The final shot is nice, and delivers a little bit of hope, but you’re still left with the deep melancholy tone the previous two hours have delivered. Amy is a true human connection for Theodore, but she also works as a video game programmer (whose games simulate what it’s like to be a mother) and aspiring documentarian (whose film of her own, actual mother is simply one long, unbroken shot of her sleeping). And Theodore, again, writes what are supposed to be personalized, intimate letters to people, in lieu of becoming personal and intimate with anyone himself. In the end, what’s achingly sad about the film is not how different Theodore is from everyone, but how similar, and how probable this future is.

 

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