I was too depressingly excited for this movie. My nerves got the best of me as I was approaching the box office, and my hand started to shake in the realization that I was about to see Spike Jonze’s new movie.
As the box office attendant looked at me and asked, “What movie, sir?” my words escaped me. I scrounged together some loose words, and what semi-coherently came from my mouth was: “I’ll do ‘Her’ at 10 p.m.”
I immediately face palmed.
But what I soon came to realize was that “Her” wasn’t just another movie that is simply just watched; “Her” isn’t an it, a you or an I. “Her” is a tangible, living pronoun and an embodiment of love.
With every film Spike Jonze directs, whether it’s “Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,” or his new Golden Globe-winning “Her,” his films pose questions and deep philosophical questions that resonate with an audience.
Set in futuristic Los Angeles, “Her” is about the life of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a writer, a romantic, an ex-lover, now loner with a distinct fashion-conscious and particularly unnerving mustache. “Her” poses the head-bobbingly painful question: What is love?
Twombly is a recovering divorcee who works for a letter-writing company. He is a man without love until the day he buys Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an artificially intelligent operating system that fills his void of loneliness and inevitably shapes his life.
“Her,” is a high-concept film that takes “guy meets girl,” a commonly recycled Hollywood plot, and places it in the not-so-distant future as a tale of “guy meets technology.” Questioning whether an actual body is necessary in order to have the capacity for love, Samantha frequently struggles with the realization that she will never be a living entity.
But what Samantha gives Twombly is something more than just companionship. She revives his soul and puts meaning back into his life despite the heartbreak that she will never exist as a human, but eternally as a voice inside the heads of many lonely men.
Despite the film being depressingly absurdist, there are undercurrents of hope and comedic genius that shape this film into an overall pleasure to watch.
A version of this story ran on page 8 on 1/16/2014 under the headline "Sorry, Siri: ‘Her’ brings hope, comedic genius to the big screen"
