HER – The Review

By Michael Haffner

Guy meets girl.  The two fall in love.  They live happily ever after.  End of film, roll credits.  That pattern of events isn’t always what happens in real life, and sometimes (rarely) that’s also not always the case on the silver screen either.  Depending on whom you’re with, love can take you to great heights or deep and dark lows.  Yet, what happens when that someone is a something?  Like say for example a computer program.  HER presents this unusual scenario with all the heart and sadness that would accompany any traditional love story.  But is it a story where you just see everything displayed on screen or actually feel it?

By day, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) works for a company that offers the service of constructing personalized letters to send to another’s loved one.  By night, Theodore searches for companionship while coping with a divorce from his ex (Rooney Mara) that has yet to be finalized.  He goes about this through playing video games with fellow online gamers and calling some strangers on the phone he has just met electronically.  All seems hopeless for the quiet and aloof outsider until he discovers a new computer operating system that is meant to be fully compatible with your personality.  Enter “Samantha.”  What begins as a few personal questions into one another’s life soon becomes much more.

Reviewing Spike Jonze’s filmography reveals trends and themes that connect many of his short projects and feature length films.  The residue of his past films can be easily identified throughout HER.  Once again the main character seems to be a loner of sorts who is looking for more from life; something that might fill an emotional void.  This same character can be previously found in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, and the beautiful and touching short film I’M HERE – a short that also finds Jonze exploring what defines love in a world of artificial life.  While the soft lighting and dreamlike gaze Jonze filters through most of his films is still intact here, art director Austin Gorg takes a unique approach to the color palette of this not so distant future world by painting it in a sea of pastel tones.  Los Angeles seems warm and inviting and the technology that the inhabitants almost solely interact with is portrayed as just as welcoming.  So often we see in films a more cold and sterile tech-based view of the future.  This unique approach to the sci-fi genre may be off-putting to some even before you get to the atypical idea of a man falling in love with his operating system.

Whether you are able to believe the connection between a man and his computer isn’t necessarily the point of the film as much as the bigger question it asks of the audience: can you accept that love can exist in an unorthodox relationship?  The whole point of HER is to question what constitutes as a real relationship in our modern and technological times.  Considering the final thing many of us do before going to bed is check our smart phones or laptops, it does seem like this could very well be the next logical step.  Spike Jonze presents this scenario in a passionate way that focuses on the quiet and intimate moments many of us have also experienced with a loved one.  Joaquin Phoenix handles this “physical” challenge with a natural innocence.  You believe that he’s falling in loving even if the idea occasionally feels preposterous.  The fact that some of the romantic scenes and dialogue fall short of eliciting a strong emotion is not to be blamed on Phoenix’s vulnerable performance, but maybe Jonze’s too sweet for his own good script.  There’s a familiar pace to the way the relationship unfolds that felt a little too rehearsed; which of course plays into the whole idea of whether or not the computer is only doing what it is being programmed to do.  As sufficient as Scarlett Johansson is in the voice-only role, I found her iconic voice distracting and overly seductive for the part.  Often her vocal inflections come across like a classy sex-line operator instead of an adequate match for Theodore’s personality.  I can’t help but wonder how Jonze’s original choice of Samantha Morton might have better fleshed-out “Samantha.”

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

In theory, HER has everything I would want in a love story.  Thoughtful ideas are brought to light and characters takes precedence over spectacle.  It’s not just some glossy, Sunday afternoon time-waster that stars a past winner of “sexiest man of the year.” Films of this genre don’t often have a lot to say about love.  That alone makes HER one of the most important relationship dramas to come out since . . . well . . . ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND  (of course written by frequent Spike Jonze collaborator Charlie Kauffman).  Unfortunately Jonze doesn’t quite have the same depth of Kaufman’s nuanced script.  Where he makes up for that is in constructing a believable future Los Angeles that could very well exist in the next ten years.  Marveling at the upgrades in current day technology and retro throwback fashion thankfully doesn’t take the focus away from the journey on display.  At the same time, the film never fully engaged me to the point that I fell under its love spell either.  I watched a well-made love story unfold but never felt a personal connection to it.  Some viewers will be able to look past and see the “person” beyond the computer and beyond the recognizable actress voicing her.  Maybe I watched HER with a closed mind, but I never actually saw “her.”  It always felt like a man talking to a computer who clearly needed “her’ more than “she” needed him – c’est la vie.  In 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the ship’s computer program, the HAL 9000, attempts to talk Dave out of pulling the plug after what it did to the rest of the crew.  Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke had the idea that man would someday have to evolve to overcome computers.  Spike Jonze seems to be saying that man may always need a counterpart, regardless if they are real or artificial.  If true love knows no bounds, who’s to say that a man can’t love a machine?  I guess I just wish it were a love that was more tangible.

4 out of 5