An unusual love story
Her (cert. 15) is the last of the Oscar® best film nominees released in the UK (and the last reviewed here) and for me it’s the weakest of the nine (it used to be five). It’s still a fascinating look at modern relationships in a slightly futuristic age, though people relating to their computers or robots is a well established sci-fi genre.
Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix, unluckily missing out on a best actor nomination) writes “beautiful handwritten” letters for a living. Customers pay, he composes, the computer writes and prints and sends.
Separated from his wife Catherine (Rooney Mara), he’s struggling with other relationships. When he buys a new computer operating system, OS1, featuring artificial intelligence, he finds the system’s personality is rather easier to relate to than real people.
Naming herself Samantha (the voice is Scarlett Johansson) OS1 quickly gets to know Theodore, culminating in virtual sex, as the screen goes dark and music rises from somewhere to match the rising passion of man and machine (who presumably is faking it). Following this through leads to a weird interlude with a “surrogate” – a real woman (Portia Doubleday) that Samantha sends round to Theodore, but this feels weird even to him.
Weird too is the 3D computer game with a funny but foulmouthed blob as guide. It was also odd to see a voice recognition future where everyone is convers- ing with their top pocket computer, then to come out of the Cornerhouse cinema into a street where a man was loudly announcing his next rendezvous to his phone and to everyone around.
Theodore’s friend Amy (Amy Adams) has her own way of interacting with her OS, but the OSs are getting together, and come up with a new identity – a British philosopher who died in 1973, Alan Watts (Brian Cox’s voice). Watts once commented on people rushing home to the “real point” of life – watching an electronic reproduction of life on TV.
Writer-director Spike Jonze has certainly provided a thought-provoking film, and as a commentary on our relationship with machines (and each other) it may well repay further study - including why he wasn’t satisfied with Samantha first being voiced by Samantha Morton. It’s just that I couldn’t shake the feeling that this might have been the way Dave and his computer Hal could have gone in 2001 A Space Odyssey.