Her
This offering by independent film king Spike Jonze’s is the first film he’s written all by himself. It’s about a man who’s all by himself. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) lives in a not-too-distant-futuristic Los Angeles and works as a writer at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. He makes graceful words out of other people’s feelings; but there is no grace to his.
He is adrift and broken after separating from his childhood sweetheart Catherine (Rooney Mara), and can’t even bring himself to sign the divorce papers. A precious shaft of light is best friend Amy (Amy Adams). Out of morbid curiosity and possibly desperation, he purchases an all-new operating system or “OS” with such perfect artificial intelligence that it’s basically human, just without a body. Meet Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. She is good for him. Maybe.
With the speed at which technology is evolving even now, both Theodore’s job and Samantha’s existence are what I would call possible impossibilities. Minds like Jonze’s can take seemingly gimmicky or ludicrous concepts like that and work them into something truly meaningful. Are we all but empty computers? We want to discover it all and lock it away and experience things. The joy of love can feel like you’ve been “activated”, and love at all doesn’t feel like it’s of this world, you may as well be a robot trying to navigate it. Dealing with so many feelings could have turned Jonze’s words purple or ornate, but they never are. Amy describes falling in love as “a socially acceptable form of insanity.” Have you ever heard a truer word spoken? Even better: “I want to allow myself joy. So fuck it.” That’s probably my motto.
Essential to communicating such an intensely universal-yet-unique work is a stellar cast that can really connect, and Jonze fortunately assembled one. A beautifully tender Joaquin Phoenix is the most graceful of everymen, vulnerable in joy and sadness. Rooney Mara steals all the flashbacks, I’d fall in love with her too, frankly. Amy Adams is a fantastic best friend, just the type you want and probably have, every bit as honest and scrappy as the person texting “Hey asshole, pick up your phone!” to you right now. Scarlett Johansson gives the best performance of her career, creating a persona and endless human appeal using just that voice, which I believe has been described as “like velvet ripping”.
Hoyte Van Hoytema shoots a perfect Los Angeles for the picture, something familiar and just out of reach at once. Primary colours, clean lines and flawless compositions. It’s technological without being cold, the ever present electronics seem somehow cosy, that quality being essential to the story. When Theodore is all but lost, the world seems heartless, and when he smiles, it smiles with him. At the former heartlessness, his apartment is a sarcophagus, and at the latter warmth, it’s a womb. Hoytema works perfectly with designer K.K Barrett. Few films have the bravery to shift their world so drastically, but our view can change that much, as though our eyes darken or lighten depending on what’s behind them. You know that’s true.
With cult director at the helm, it seems only (un)fair that cult musicians come along for the ride. Arcade Fire composed original music, the most special being what Samantha names “a musical photograph”. Karen O’s perfect “The Moon Song” had an Oscar nomination, and believe me it deserves one. It seems ancient with beauty and completely spontaneous at once.
Her is that strangest genre, the kind-of-autobiographical film. Not since Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (which shared Barrett as a designer) has a film captured emotional emptiness and yet made it ache in a lovely way, rather than being crushingly sorrowful. It’s both funny and sad that those two are similar, as their directors used to be married. There are those who say Coppola’s film came straight from the vein of that divorce, explored how she had been feeling; and now they will say Jonze has done it too.
The gentle comedy, the preciousness of human interaction, the sweet sorrow in a big city, even the way the characters look out of windows or lie on their beds… there are parallels here, no question. Whether it’s our business or not (and it’s not), I for one am seeing the elegance of two filmmakers turning their own heartbeats into rhythms for others to follow, to know that they aren’t alone, to give them an hour or two of beauty that goes bone deep. And of course, among those other people are each other. Maybe these two films are what they wanted to say, but didn’t have the courage to, only in their art. I hope they have the elegance to see them, and maybe even say they liked them. All this might not affect how you view the film, but it’s another layer of beauty to me.
Whether you class it that autobiographical way or not, it’s a masterwork. It’s literally and meta-fictionally about someone taking feelings out of the world and making beauty out of them – how else would you class Theodore’s job? That kind of sweet sadness and endless cleverness makes Her, the same way it made Tim Burton’s scissorhands. They’re about someone and everyone, something so specific (or, in Her’s case, impossible) that a person deals with, and yet at the end of the day the feelings are what we all have inside, somewhere. A film like this makes you look. It taps into that luminously bottomless vault of all our shared emotions, things you could never explain to another person, and never know they feel the exact same way. Not until someone like Jonze finds it in the vault and lets it blossom. Truly great artists have the key.
