Phoenix delivers great performance in love story with futuristic twist
In “Her,” writer/director Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich,” “Where the Wild Things Are”) has struck the perfect note: It’s a beautiful, funny, moving and legitimately romantic science fiction film.
“Her” is set in the foreseeable future, with a setting that makes it one of the most quietly realistic futuristic films ever made. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), whose name sounds like a Roald Dahl character, is a quiet man shuffling through life in Los Angeles. He writes letters for people by dictating to a computer that writes his words on handwritten stationary and then prints them out.
Separated from his wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), Theodore is lacking companionship in his life. His longtime friend Amy (Amy Adams) and co-worker Paul (Chris Pratt) keep him from complete loneliness, but he is sorely missing love in his life.
While walking home, he sees an advertisement for a new operating system, which is accessed through a small device like an iPhone that is the newest technology in artificial intelligence. The system is designed to service every need of its user and to function as a multi-purpose tool. Theodore buys one, loads it up and begins talking to Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), his new operating system.
Bashful but intrigued, he begins questioning Samantha and strikes up a warm rapport with her. Before long, Samantha starts growing in awareness and becomes a fully formed person, just one without a body, and the two fall in love with each other.
The premise is one that could have gone wrong in so many places, but Jonze never lets it slip away. He’s not showing a future with flying cars or jet packs but rather one focused on characters and their intimate relationships, human and digital. It is rather remarkable how believable the advancements in technology are and how humans use them in their daily lives.
For some, the basic premise may sound like a crude SNL sketch in which a man ends up humping his computer monitor, but the film could not be farther from that. The connection Theodore and Samantha form is more honest, resonant and legitimately sexy than most romantic films these days.
In a world where phones and gadgets have become a huge distraction in people’s lives — to the point where they are not really living them — the idea of forming a bond between a human and a form of artificial intelligence is not absurd; it’s prescient. Forget gay marriage, the next debate will be about marriage between human and operating system.
Joaquin Phoenix continues to show that he is one of the best actors working today, going from a gnarled, alcoholic soldier in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” in 2012 to a nebbish writer with a glasses and a little mustache in “Her.”
Perhaps the best performance of all is Scarlett Johansson’s, even though there is nothing visually to behold. Her purely vocal performance is as good as any on-screen performance last year.
It is an especially playful detail to cast one of the screen’s greatest beauties and not ever show her. Her voice, aided greatly by Jonze’s intelligent writing, gives her a presence lacking in many of the bimbos in most romantic comedies.
Originally, Samantha Morton was cast in the role, and she actually was on set interacting with Phoenix throughout the entire filming. After shooting wrapped, Jonze felt the performance did not fit the film.
With Morton’s grace, the role was taken over by Johansson in post-production. Knowing she was working against previously recorded footage makes her performance especially wondrous.
The set design has an earthy, warm hue to it that feels paradoxically retro. The characters do not wear monochromatic jumpsuits or clownish, Hunger Games-like getups, but rather lots of woolen clothes. There are plenty of slick, mechanical contraptions surrounding the characters, but the future does not seem like the nightmarish hellscape it usually does in sci-fi film.
“Her” works on so many levels: as a visionary glimpse into the future, a perceptive character study and a thought-provoking look into the power of love and empathy, even in the most unusual of circumstances.
No matter what is invented or what the future brings, in “Her,” love is what sustains us.