Spike Jonze’s offbeat futuristic romance Her throws a few intriguing wrenches into the works of the sci-fi genre, specifically by allowing the relationship between man and computer to become genuinely amorous, a concept that sound absurd at face value but becomes genuinely believable, if not heartbreaking, by the end of the film. Unlike A.I., in which Spielberg imagines a near future in which robotic children are programmed to “love” their adoptive parents, Jonze’s film suggests that intimate feelings of romantic love could plausibly develop between someone and his or her computer assuming said computer was running on software with artificial intelligence of sufficient depth and complexity. The other quirk to Jonze’s vision, and the one that will make it hit close to home for many a modern viewer, is that the film’s computer intelligence is not locked on a spaceship blasting through the cosmos or encased in a human-like robot; rather, it is in the operating system that runs the computers and handheld devices that we use everyday. It is, in a word, mundane.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Theodore Twombly, an introverted man who has recently separated from his fiery-tempered wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), and as a result has withdrawn even more from the world than his inward disposition would typically dictate. Phoenix, who excels at playing characters who hide great depths behind an inarticulate exterior, makes Theodore into a sympathetic sad sack who mopes about his mostly empty Los Angeles apartment playing video games to pass the time while pouring his internalized emotions into his job, where he writes cards and letters for other people (apparently in the future, everything is outsourced, including intimacy and memory). His life changes when he installs a new operating system on his computer, which comes with an artificial intelligence that turns out to be much more sophisticated than he expected. Self-named Samantha and voiced with breathy, girlish exuberance and innocence by Scarlett Johansson, this operating system becomes Theodore’s constant companion, confidant, friend, and eventually lover, as she develops what seems to be, for all practical purposes, a fully human conscience. And who can blame Theodore? Outside of her lack of physical embodiment, Samantha is almost perfect in every way: she’s witty, articulate, sensitive, caring, and smart without being pretentious or ostentatious (when she chooses her name, she reads an entire book of names in less than a second, but delivers that information with a genuinely casual sense of “What’s the big deal? That’s what I do.”).

Naturally, there are some problems with a human-computer romance, the first being the potential fallout from friends and family who might be somewhat taken aback by the idea. One of Jonze’s more interesting conceits is that not only is Theodore’s new romance quickly accepted by most of his friends and coworkers, it becomes a genuine social phenomenon, with other people falling in love with their OS’s, as well. Theodore’s best friend, Amy (Amy Adams), who he has known since college and who lives in his building, is also having relationship issues with her husband and develops a close friendship with her OS. When Theodore goes on a double date with a coworker and his girlfriend, he simply brings his smartphone along so Samantha can join them, and wouldn’t you know it, she turns out to be the life of the party. The lack of two-way physical intimacy is a tougher issue to surmount, and one of the film’s more bizarre, uncomfortable sequences involves Samantha hiring a body surrogate (Portia Doubleday) to be with Theodore in her place. Ah, the trials and tribulations of modern love.

Writing and directing solo for the first time in his career, Jonze reinforces the penchant for sentiment that we’ve seen in his previous work, including his surprisingly robust and psychologically compelling adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s perennial children’s book classic Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and even Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa (2013), which may wallow without apology in juvenile humor but still manages to connect emotionally (however, like Wild Things, Her is stretched further than it needs to go and suffers somewhat from a somewhat flaccid middle section). Jonze is clearly going for earnestness, and he achieves it, although his punk sensibilities (first honed in the masochistic pranks of Jackass and boundary-pushing music videos for the Beastie Boys and Fatboy Slim) show up—we might say “intrude”—every once in a while, most gregariously in a foul-mouthed video game character voiced by Jonze himself. However, even at its most successful, Her doesn’t quite manage the sublime romantic pathos achieved by his former favorite screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (who penned Jonze’s first two films, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), a high-concept sci-fi romantic mind-bender that is so perfectly constructed that the concept melts into the emotion. Jonze doesn’t quite get there, as Her’s concept remains too front and center.

At times Her feels redundant, as if Jonze is concerned that we won’t buy into his premise so he has to keep pushing its plausibility on us, but the final quarter develops in ways that are both surprising and tragically foreseeable. Without giving too much away (although those fearful of any kind of spoilers might want to quite reading), I will suggest that the heart of Her is not so much about the literalness of human-computer interactions, but rather about the potential impossibility of two distinctly different sensibilities maintaining a relationship. Theodore may love everything about Samantha and see in her a kind of soul mate, but there are depths to her that he, with his human limitations, cannot even fathom, but from her perspective make perfect sense. Although she may appear functionally human, in the end the reality of Samantha’s true nature underscores the fact that there is a great difference between being human-like and being genuinely human, even as her actions mirror exactly the kinds of things that day in and day out doom even the greatest of love stories.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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