“Her”

‘Her’ Reviewed by Noel Curry …

The latest film from Spike Jonze (only his fourth would you believe) begins like a slightly sunny outing of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Lonely about-to-be-divorcee Theodore Twombly (sympathetically played by Joaquin Phoenix) forms a romantic attachment to his new computer operating system called Samantha (expertly voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Many have already pointed out that it does bear some resemblance to the Black Mirror episode ‘Be Right Back’. Whilst both deal with people who form a relationship with a digitally created personality, ‘Be Right Back’ focuses on technology’s inability to believably recreate a real personality and, by revealing the gaps in a microchip’s attempts to be human, serves as a warning not to replace human relationships with simulated ones.

‘Her’ imagines a technology that already possesses consciousness. Initially this new software adapts by imitating human behaviour but it can also learn and soon evolves a unique voice of its own. Jonze’s film convincingly portrays how Twombly’s initial infatuation with his spangly new toy quickly develops into one of mutual attraction. How many of you have frittered away excessive hours gleefully playing with the latest must-have gadget, before developing a relationship with it that basically amounts to ‘I can’t bear to be apart from it’?

I was expecting a film that deals with a man who dates his computer to be weirdly kooky and offbeat, but the film manages to take this outlandish premise and make it believable. We are now used to taking extraordinary technological leaps in our stride and this just happens to be the one that could be next. So the film becomes not one about technology, but a love story or, more accurately, a film about love and the nature of love. Are emotions any less valid when they’re directed towards something that has been created? Before you answer that, think of any film, book or song that has ever genuinely moved you and ask yourself if you consider those emotions to be any less real because, to a degree, they’ve been simulated. However, are we also isolating ourselves from the authentic human experience by wrapping ourselves up in simulated versions of social interaction that have had all the awkward bumps and edges of everyday life conveniently smoothed off?

Throughout the film, we often see characters (foreground and background) chattering away to some device whilst completely ignoring and avoiding all the other people around them. This reflects the loneliness of urban living that is only being exacerbated by ever more sophisticated gadgets. Twombly’s soon-to-be-ex-wife accuses him of choosing the safety of a digital relationship because he’s not capable of accepting the hardships of maintaining a marriage and that he clings to an idealised version of what love should be. We see Twombly have a hilariously inept internet sex-chat with an anonymous partner and, on a blind date, he fails to connect with a beautiful woman who seems ideal for him. This is because he still hasn’t got over his failed marriage.

However, the film does not opt for the easy option of simply labelling technology as ‘bad’ and real/human as ‘good’. The relationship Twombly has with his computer starts to bring him out of his shell and his friend (played by Amy Adams) encourages it by telling him that if it’s working for him then he should go for it. She reminds him that there is no normal with the heart by saying that love is just a socially acceptable form of insanity. There is no right or wrong way to pursue it. It should also be pointed out that Samantha is not some easily programmable cypher that Twombly can reprogramme to suit his needs. She exists as an independent identity who matures, like most technology, at an astonishing rate. For Twombly, whose marriage (it is hinted at) broke down because he was unable to cope with how his wife had changed, this is an especially challenging concept.

The performances throughout are superb. Joaquin Phoenix manages to capture the heartache and reawakening of a man struggling to deal with love in the modern age without succumbing to mawkishness or bitterness. And Scarlett Johansson, in a voice only performance, makes us believe that the leap from Siri to ‘serious’ is entirely possible. This is an intriguing examination of the real and the simulated and the fast dissolving barriers between the two. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Twombly’s work where he composes letters for other people to send to each other. He ‘writes’ them by speaking to a computer and then prints out a ‘hand-written’ letter. That job description sounds like a Mobius strip of the real and simulated with one blurring into the other. The film does this with locations even as it was shot in both Los Angeles and Shanghai in order to create a version of L.A. in the near future. This story operates in much the same way, tumbling and intertwining the real and the simulated until we can’t see the join anymore and start to think that maybe it doesn’t matter anymore.