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Movies & TV Movies & TV Reviews

Her

HER written and directed by Spike Jonze, with Joaquin Phoenix, ­Rooney Mara, Amy Adams and Scarlett Johansson. A Warner Bros. release. 125 minutes. Now playing. For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN


On the most basic narrative level, Her is science fiction. It’s set in the very near future, in a Los Angeles with barely any cars, the buildings connected by skywalks people actually use. Computers no longer have keyboards, just voice commands and holographic interfaces. Video games interact with you. You tell your phone to play a melancholy song and it knows almost exactly what you mean.

In this future, you can install an operating system on your PC that’s basically an artificial intelligence – which means it can adjust itself specifically to your needs. And instead of triggering the rise of Skynet, it falls in love with you.

That’s what Spike Jonze’s fascinating new movie is about: love. When the emotionally withdrawn Theodore Twombley (Joaquin Phoenix) installs that operating system – which names itself Samantha and is voiced with perfect perky opacity by Scarlett Johansson – his only intention is to set up his computer.

But then his computer asks him questions, laughs at his jokes and treats him as the most interesting person in the world. Of course, he’s drawn to it – to her. Why wouldn’t he be? She’s perfect for him. She just doesn’t, you know, exist in the physical realm.

Jonze presents this imagined world as utterly ordinary. The tech is just there, like the redeveloped Los Angeles we aren’t encouraged to marvel at it, just to accept it and focus on the story.

It’s as wide-open and genuine as his adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, though not as emotionally raw. This is a movie where people process their feelings rather than release them, and that may make viewers uncomfortable – especially in a sequence where Samantha tries to make her relationship with Theodore more decisively physical. Love is simple, but love is also complicated.

Her is essentially a story about how technology can facilitate a relationship over impossible distances, and what happens when one partner evolves more quickly than the other. In the end, it’s as beholden to Annie Hall as it is to 2001, and don’t think that isn’t the strangest sentence I’ve written this year.


OSCAR BUZZ Spike Jonze’s movies rarely catch on with the Academy, so I’d be surprised if Her rated anything more than a nomination for original screenplay. But with any luck, voters won’t be able to resist nominating Scarlett Johansson for supporting actress to make a statement: it’d be the first time an actor has been nominated for a voice-over performance, and she totally deserves it. (Joaquin Phoenix certainly merits an actor nod as well, but I think the odds are against him.)

normw@nowtoronto.com | @wilnervision

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