Her (**3/4)

The premise of Her — man falls in love with operating system — is both intriguing and goofy. Written and directed by Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are), it uses a nominally sci-fi premise to explore the meaning of love. In its vision of the near future, not unlike the present day, everyone walks around talking into electronic devices. Also, men get divorced and are lonely, like cubicle jockey Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who composes, and dictates to a computer, apparently heartfelt letters that others pass off as their own. (One imagines the reactions of widows realizing that their monosyllabic husband’s exquisite love letters were the words of another.)

Twombly walks out of the office dictating to a cute little device that made me think of a foldable mirror that might be kept in a purse, but in this case reads emails to him. But a new operating system, simply called OS1, has been invented that will interact with you as never before. It comes with paper directions and, in what seems like whimsy in a movie that is not whimsical, asks Theodore a few random-seeming questions, then emerges with the voice of Scarlett Johansson, naming herself (itself?) Samantha, just because she (it?) likes the name. (OS1 gives you the choice of a male or female voice, but not a gender-ambiguous one.)

What this reminded me of before I saw it was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which also explored love and identity with a nominally sci-fi premise. However, where that movie was funny and kinetic, this movie is deliberate and earnest. It is occasionally funny, but not often. Once, during a sex scene, it is unintentionally funny. Virtually so, anyway. At other times, it’s the cinematic equivalent of listening to other people’s love letters, like the ones Theodore invents. The sincerity can be almost cloying at times.

It’s not that I mind a serious or even somber movie, but a lighter tone might have helped sell me on the idea that a human would not mind the absence of a body, or that an artificial intelligence that thinks fast enough to read hundreds of books in seconds would not be bored by a human. The latter point is, in fact, addressed eventually, and Jonze certainly does make you think about what it means to love, about loneliness, and about how we will interact with our computers in the future. This is mostly about the first two questions, using Twombly as the experiment. The other significant characters in the film are his soon-to-be ex-wife (Rooney Mara) and his office friend (Amy Adams), so there is only a glimpse of a vision of what true artificial intelligence might mean for society. I can see the reason for the movie’s acclaim; it has a depth to it, and a stylistic unity. But, I still liked Robot & Frank better.

IMDb link

viewed 2/6/14 6:55 pm at AMC Cherry Hill; posted 2/9/14