editors: Eric Zumbrunnen, Jeff Buchanan
cinematography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Like a lot of great science fiction, Spike Jonze’s Her uses the future to articulate the present more profoundly than wholly contemporary films could. No film of the last five years has better defined the relationship people have with technology and each other, and few have been as insightful about the mysteries of the heart, and how lovers connect and drift apart. In Her, the affair happens between Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a high-waisted writer still reeling from a divorce, and a computer operating system named Samantha (Scarlett Johansson). That relationship gives Her a novel gimmick that Jonze makes utterly plausible. He’s aware that it’s a leap for audiences to buy into an affair between a man and an OS, and he finds small ways to make it easier, from Theodore’s funny, embarrassed self-awareness to Johansson’s voice, which has its own vivid associations. There’s a flirty intimacy to their conversations that reflects the bonds people can make over IM or email exchanges.
It would be enough for Jonze to show the modern appeals of a virtual relationship, of being able to love a compliant, responsive, fully customizable mate instead of a thornier, non-virtual one. But Her doesn’t stop there. The phenomenon it ultimately expresses, with heartbreaking insight, is the trajectory of a doomed relationship—how people (and the Operating Systems that represent them) are constantly changing, and sometimes evolve past each other. Jonze has made a break-up film that doubles as a capsule-worthy snapshot of how we live today, when technology has torn down some barriers and erected others that are difficult to scale. The quest for a real, human moment is movie-long, but Her doesn’t lack warmth or feeling. It simply finds it, like Theodore, in surprising, unconventional places. —Scott Tobias
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