Spike Jonze (2013)
Her is a fine idea but proof that you can have too much of a good thing. At 125 minutes, it’s way too long – and, if you know the running time beforehand, punitive because it’s obvious so soon what’s in store. Even so, I like the film, for various reasons. It’s good to see something that’s visually extraordinary and crucially verbal, something that belongs unarguably on a cinema screen but isn’t a blockbuster. The story is set in Los Angeles in the near future – much of it was shot in Shanghai in 2012, which brings the future nearer (and also perhaps explains the striking number of Asians in evidence in this version of LA). The interiors of office buildings and apartments – elegant, eerily spacious, impersonal – are a remarkable piece of design. (The DoP is Hoyte van Hoytema; the production design is by K K Barrett and Gene Serdena.) I like Her also because it’s science fiction with imagination although those with a better understanding of computer games and the potential of IT may be less impressed by this aspect than I was. The main character is the tweely-named Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix). He falls in love with the her of the title – his computer operating system, aka Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Spike Jonze creates the world of this relationship carefully and cleverly. Theodore, who earns a living writing letters for other people, is going through a divorce. If he feels lonely, he can go through prospective night-time conversation partners as easily as switching channels on a TV remote. It’s suggested at one point that relationships of the kind that Theodore and Samantha develop are unusual but not exceptional. Yet it’s a decisive – from Theodore’s point of view, a shocking – moment when he realises with just how many operating system users Samantha has a personal relationship: she is talking with 8,316 others, of whom, she says, she’s fallen in love with 641. The effect of this revelation on Theodore doesn’t make much sense. In the world of the film, why wouldn’t it have occurred to him before, especially in view of his job in the personal communications industry?
Her isn’t a jeremiad about technology taking over human lives. While this is part of the culture being described, it isn’t the moral of the story: it’s a relief that Spike Jonze isn’t interested in making such an obvious and potentially censorious point. The film’s subject seems rather to be a familiar one, placed in a distinctive context: the difficulty of sustaining a relationship. But there’s another difficulty in this film, one of Jonze’s own making. Perhaps it’s intentional that the main characters speak in the same way – that halting yet eventually metronomic, struggling-to-find-the-words-I-need-to-say-how-I-really-feel tempo. Whether intentional or not, the effect is dulling. The confidential tone in conversations is virtually a monotone and, because I struggled to hear much of what was being said, the rhythm and register of the voices really dominated. It’s energising when Theodore and his ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) have lunch together. She gets annoyed and, just for a moment, there’s tension in the air. Joaquin Phoenix is one of the actors I now most look forward to watching on screen and casting him as the benign, passive Theodore Twombly is certainly interesting. I was fearful before seeing Her that Phoenix in this role might merely be subduing the emotional conflict and volatility which delivered a fine performance in Walk the Line and an even better one in The Master. This doesn’t happen: Phoenix gets right inside Theodore and the many tight close-ups reveal nothing false. The problem is rather that he gets too far inside the character – he’s likeable and witty but he seems submerged.
As Theodore’s friend Amy, Amy Adams is terrific – as free and as varied as I’ve seen her – in the first half of the story. (As she showed in Junebug, she has a real flair for comedy.) Later on, as things go wrong for Amy – her own marriage disintegrates – and she turns melancholy, Adams’s playing is less engaging. Witty as Scarlett Johansson is, there’s a similar disappointment with Samantha’s voice once the mood darkens. After going nowhere fast for a long time, the climax to Her seems hurried but I wasn’t sorry. Shortly before Theodore’s discovery that Samantha is common property, she briefly goes offline and he panics that he’s lost her. In this sequence, the speed at which both the film and Joaquin Phoenix suddenly move is a shot in the arm. The ending is disappointingly conventional: Theodore writes his own farewell letter to Catherine and there’s a suggestion that he may be about to embark on a relationship with a real girl in Amy. With Olivia Wilde as a blind date for Theodore, and Portia Doubleday as a sex surrogate who simulates Samantha. (Neither evening ends well.)
16 February 2014
