Computer love

In the future imagined by director Spike Jonze in Her, people are not overtly unhappy. There’s less strife and disease in the world, and more gadgets exist to make human life easier. But there’s a core unhappiness, a kind of deep-down sadness written on their faces and on the face of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoneix), a lonely man who writes personalized letters for people who can no longer express themselves. At the company where he works, BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, he sits in front of a computer screen and recites prose that is instantly rendered into handwriting, then printed out. It’s nice to know there are still jobs for writers in the future.

Otherwise, in Jonze’s future, people don’t seem to read very much. They mainly talk to little book-like devices they carry around with them everywhere. These are linked to computer operating systems that manage their daily lives.

But Theodore, getting through a difficult divorce from Catherine (Rooney Mara), signs on for a new OS system, and discovers a whole new world. His OS has a female voice (Scarlett Johansson) and calls itself Samantha. Samantha is the new model of an artificial intelligence system. Not only can she access every available fact in nanoseconds, her brain is constantly evolving, reacting to the world around her in the way human minds do. Samantha is super smart, and yet really a babe in the woods.

Naturally, Theodore falls in love with her. In Spike Jonze’s satire, this is not so unusual. It turns out many other humans develop rich symbiotic relationships with their OSes. Some become close friends, some become lovers. In Theodore’s case, there’s the equivalent of phone sex, talking their way to mutual satisfaction in a darkened room.

The locale of Her is near-future Los Angeles, but parts were shot in Shanghai, which seems more futuristic, and it could easily evoke Japan, a society that indulges rather avant-garde notions about human interaction, such as grown salary men who carry on full relationships with manga body pillows. Somehow, the spectacle of these men carrying body pillows around on subway trains is tolerated by Japanese society; in Her, people start to take it for granted that humans can pair up with computer voices. Theodore notices more and more people having animated conversations with their little book-like gadgets. No judging.

We don’t encounter too many other humans in Her, besides Theodore’s office mate and his girlfriend, and his married friends Amy (Amy Adams) and Charles (Matt Letscher), who are heading for divorce. There’s a failed attempt at a blind date with Olivia Wilde, but Theodore shuts down when she spills how she doesn’t want to get hurt again in a relationship. In his mind, he’s still processing his divorce to Catherine, a volatile woman who was his childhood sweetheart. In Jonze’s tale, relationships are fragile vessels, and people are less likely to hop onboard.

No wonder Theodore prefers Samantha. Their relationship is depicted almost like a movie rom-com, or a Woody Allen film from the ‘70s. There are date montages: they dance (well, Theodore dances), they go to the beach together, she even composes songs for him on piano. Theodore is shown laughing heartily to himself in restaurants, with only his little headset for company.

The original plan for Her was a joint project with Charlie Kaufman, but Jonze ended up writing the script himself. The film’s style evokes both Kaufman’s surreality (especially that of Synecdoche, New York) and, oddly, the quiet tone explored by his ex-wife Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. (The film and the screenplay for Her have both received Oscar nominations.)

Johansson is no stranger to playing vixens. Here, she tamps it down, using her voice to suggest vulnerability as well as complexity. Her disembodied voice accompanies Theodore through most of the movie. Like a real person, she gets angry, hurt, jealous. Then she examines why and learns not to do it anymore. She literally transcends the human pitfalls of emotion. How logical.

While Her is a satire, with a few laughs, it’s actually a soulful examination of our future, interfacing more and more with the digital world. We already rely on Siri and Waze to answer our questions, do our email, guide us around the city. How much more will our lives intertwine with technology in the near future? And what happens, as Spielberg’s A.I. imagined, when that technology starts to get smarter and more self-sufficient than we?

All this could be heavy-handed, a sci-fi nightmare. There have been such movie scenarios in the past, like 2001 and that old ‘70s sci-fi flick, Demon Seed, in which a home computer falls in love with and impregnates a woman against her will. Even Dave Eggers’ recent novel The Circle imagines a future where social media erases people’s desire for privacy; they become slaves to a hive mentality.

Spike Jonze doesn’t go there. His relationship between Theodore and Samantha proceeds like a real relationship, with bumps in the road (Samantha’s jealousy, his fear that others will judge him for dating a computer). But then something happens in their lives together: one outgrows the other. It’s a remarkable turn in the script that rings true. When Samantha describes their relationship as like writing a book, but “the spaces between each word in the book are infinite” for her, you know things are heading to an end. There’s an ineffable sadness to the scene.

But something also happens to Theodore, in one of Phoenix’s most restrained performances to date: he grows, too. He comes to understand that old chestnut from the ‘70s: “If you love someone, set them free; if they come back, they’re yours; if they don’t, they never were.” I think it was Richard Bach who said that. Or maybe it was Sting. I’ll have to look it up.