![]() ![]() ![]() It’s possible I let myself be seduced too much by the surfaces of Her, which is, arguably, something of a cinematic luxury product, with drifty ambient music by Karen O, The Breeders, and Arcade Fire, gorgeous ochre-toned cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, and clever costume design by Casey Storm (in the near future, Hollywood-waisted tweed trousers will apparently come roaring back into style diet accordingly). Later, as Samantha’s consciousness begins to evolve and grow-remember, this is a woman, or entity, who can master whole fields of human knowledge in a matter of seconds-Theodore starts to feel jealous of her vast circle of invisible virtual friends, who include an AI reconstruction of the consciousness of the late Zen philosopher Alan Watts (a hilariously intimidating romantic rival if there ever was one). ![]() But are humans and human-designed artificial intelligences capable of engaging in a real relationship? Samantha experiments with inviting a human sex surrogate to stand in for her in a physical encounter with her beloved, with humiliating results all around. Everywhere Theodore looks, he sees people engaged in thoughtful colloquy with unseen interlocutors. But soon we start to notice that Theodore isn’t the only one palling around with a nonphysical entity: His best friend Amy (Amy Adams), a video-game designer and aspiring filmmaker who’s also recently separated, regards her female-voiced OS as a dear friend and sits up giggling with her late into the night. I won’t reveal too much about where Samantha and Theodore’s story goes from there, because it’s after the high-concept premise has come to feel natural that Her really takes off. With dizzying rapidity, the man and his operating system find themselves falling in love-and starting to accept, along with the audience, the notion that having a body isn’t a necessary prerequisite to having a relationship. They engage in long, searching late-night conversations and excursions around the city with a monitor propped in Theodore’s pocket, camera side out, so that Samantha can “see” the places they’re exploring. ![]() Over the next few weeks, Theodore, bemused by the verisimilitude of this new technology, begins to test the limits of his new operating system (or is she testing his?). After scanning a book of names in a fraction of a second, she chooses her own name, “Samantha,” and sets about organizing Theodore’s inbox with as much empathy as efficiency, even laughing at the jokes she comes across in his old emails. When Theodore boots up the new system and answers a few preliminary questions, a strange thing happens: a female voice (that of Scarlett Johansson) comes online, speaking into Theodore’s wireless earpiece with a spontaneity and naturalness that belies her digital origin. That is, until the night Theodore brings home the OS1, a new computer operating system that he’s seen touted (in a curiously apocalyptic ad campaign) as the first artificially intelligent system of its kind. After work in the evenings, Theodore plays interactive video games that are a shade more immersive than those currently in existence but that nonetheless leave him feeling empty and unfulfilled. He lives in a high-rise apartment in a Los Angeles that, once again, seems just slightly off from the version of the city we know, a little bigger and shinier and more sterile (many of the film’s exteriors were shot in a district of Shanghai). That beautifully economical first scene makes you laugh even as it sets up the question that Her will investigate with a philosophical ambition rare in contemporary cinematic sci-fi: How are human beings changing as a result of, and in concert with, technology?Īs we soon learn, the letter-writer, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lonely, socially awkward sort, separated for nearly a year from his wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), but unable to bring himself to sign the divorce papers. In a few swift, witty strokes, Spike Jonze, the writer and director of the ravishing new film Her, has established an ever-so-slightly futuristic world, one in which human intimacy is routinely outsourced to professional letter-writers who do the caring, remembering, confessing, and kvelling for you. ![]()
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