3.5 stars out of 5
Spoiler alert: She ends up cheating on Joaquin Phoenix with the guy from the Amazon Kindle commercials.
She is her, the artificial-intelligence-enhanced operating system in the latest offering from Spike Jonze. It’s his first film for adults since Adaptation way back in 2002, and his first directorial effort since slumming at the recent YouTube Music Video Awards. The thing about Adaptation—and Jonze’s other grown-up movie, Being John Malkovich—is that they had scripts by the twisted Charlie Kaufman. Here, in Her, Jonze writes and directs all by himself. Maybe, just maybe, not the absolute best idea, but, it certainly fits the subject matter.
Because Jonze has created a dystopian and extremely recognizable world, about a week and a half into the future. (Beyond the slight upgrade in technology, the only real difference seems to be that men wear their pants pulled up a little higher.) The movie’s basic idea is both wildly creative and incredibly obvious: We’re all walking around staring at our phones all day, instead of interacting with others. So what if someone actually fell in love with a phone?
Jonze then stocks his cast with top talent playing against type. Joaquin Phoenix portrays someone friendly. Amy Adams is mousy. And most daringly, Scarlett Johansson doesn’t have a body.
But it’s very much Joaquin’s show, and he does fine work here. As Theodore, Phoenix really captures the loneliness of the modern/future world—and how easy it is to withdraw into it, away from intimacy. He plays video games and engages in anonymous phone sex. He goes to work and comes home again, surrounded by a million other people plugged into their own technology. The hyper-self-absorption of life has even created the job he’s quite skilled at: writer at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. Theodore is a 21st-century Cyrano.
Then it’s both wonderful and frightening to watch Theodore fall in love and open himself up. Hey, if Scarlett Johansson was Siri, you’d fall in love too. It’s here that the movie begins teetering on the edge of absolute stupidity, but never really loses its balance. Wrongly handled, the audience would be howling with laughter. (“Hey, that’s not my USB input!”) Or a lesser filmmaker could go the easy route and have the computer become sinister and possessive, seizing control of all other technology to terrorize our hero.
Nope, Jonze plays it straight. That is the movie’s strength, and for me, also its weakness. Because I started out totally captivated by this film, and the environment that Jonze dreamed up. But where I hoped the movie would lift me to a higher place, it kind of just… kept going. Once you accept the man-meets-operating system conceit, this is really just a love story. Sure, it’s a higher grade of love story than you might get from Katherine Heigl and Dermot Mulroney, but it’s still just a love story. Boy is sad. Boy finds girl. Girl helps boy be a better person. Boy tires of girl. Etc. etc.
It’s never less than good, but, I just wanted something more. And that’s where I think a Charlie Kaufman could’ve helped out—adding another twist, or another half a layer—to push the proceedings over the top.
I will admit, when the end credits rolled, I did feel a little creepy pulling my phone out of my pocket.
Jack Silbert, curator