By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 29, 2014
Spike Jonze isn’t content with creativity, creativity (again), and childhood. Now he aims to dissect, define, clean up, and send the concept of love into cinematic future history.
Jonze has been sketching out this idea for a few years, in his computer-head half-hour I’m Here and picture book stop-motion short Mourir Auprès de Toi. His previous feature films, too, contain segments of ideas that get centre stage in Her (most notably Meryl Streep’s under-the-influence dialtone synchrony from Adaptation.)
All of these, Her included, are extremely defensive statements of artistic principles, which sounds officious, but for all the narrative and visual tricks Jonze is known for, when it comes time for any narrative development his films have the tenor of an educational program. Or in the case of his and Dave Eggers’ elongated interpretation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, “a child’s point of view.” Everything is obliged to exist for the main character, every problem takes on symbolic meaning for the entire world, and the only thing standing in the way of the (always artistically gifted) main character is himself.
In Her, the elaborate premise is in the future tense. Anxiety over alienation and dependency on “smart” technology arrive unharmed and only slightly modified. Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) dictates saccharine correspondence for people who have forgotten how to handwrite (the era’s folk art, surely) from within the bright, airy chambers of what, if freezeframed, would look like an ad for Google, Apple, or the Gap. He commutes via elevator and leaden walk to a glass-panoramic apartment (all the better to feel lost in), dozes off to tinkly piano and harmonium rattle courtesy Win Butler (Arcade Fire) and Owen Pallett, and repeats. In this version of the future, indoors and out are nearly indistinguishable. Rather than a Minority Report assault of personalized surveillance and promotion, all is antiseptic and friendly. It’s comfortable, convenient, and along with Los Angeles’ imagined turn toward a cityscape that’s pollution- and crime-free, in style.
Into this, a relatively low-key product launch (though, like all the scenes in Her, still one jewelled and glorified) gives Theodore what he needs: the gradual erasure of his self-doubts. The product is Samantha (he gets to choose the gender), an operating system with a large personality database, no shortage of ways to make file organization and appointment scheduling seem like glowing fun, and the voice of Scarlett Johansson.
Within seconds his email history is known, instantly his existence becomes all-important, and through Samantha’s perky curiosity and his wounded melancholy, they fall in information-love, which is really closer to a form of therapy. Samantha becomes the voice inside his head that convinces him to get out of bed in the morning, pushes him to set up a date some friends have already set him up with (he’d be reluctant to call himself reluctant), and assures him a human being is an enviable thing to be. Before long they’re laughing, running through sunbeams, playing wordgames, and writing each other songs. She’s the guide through his dreams, the spring in his step, the cellphone in his pocket. It’s nauseating, unless you’re into that sort of thing.
Even if you are for monotonous love narratives, Her still has the same problems as the rest of Jonze’s pictures: ideas precede actors. Olivia Wilde, Amy Adams, Portia Doubleday, and Rooney Mara all give performances suggestive of directions that are considerably more interesting than the central “I’m having all kinds of feelings I’ve never felt before” couple, but are useful to the narrative only in how each represents something to Theodore. They are experiences he can interpret, failures to learn from, people he can use to boost or steady himself. Where most of the movie tortures itself trying to get the audience into Theodore’s interiority, there’s nothing like that for the short, but far more unpredictable intervals these characters show up for.
It’s typical of a Jonze movie, especially the ones written by Charlie Kaufman, to feature lines that essentially criticize the whole movie, only to move on, as if voicing a criticism is the same as avoiding being the direct target of one. It’s intelligent posture and nothing more. Her is more interested in coddling than criticizing its perspective. Every time Phoenix puts his OS-white earpiece in with a smile, it’s a sign the scene will go nowhere. One of the few scenes not reduced to context-elided shorthand, a divorce signing, (the one scene where Mara’s character gets to actually speak any lines and isn’t a presentation of Theodore’s selective memory), comes as a break from Johansson’s positive reinforcement. But by the time the movie reaches its Fight Club-echoing ending (of all things), Jonze’s script chooses to push away anything uncomfortable, and with it tunes out its most varied and arresting voices.
“Am I just programming?” asks a voice at one point, making explicit the code and data parallels of humans and their technology that’s the movie’s sort-of subject. Her basically stops there, spending the rest of its running time cheering on its “sensitive guy” (Theodore’s workplace gets a speech on the subject) with nods to thinkpiece-ready relevance. What form will love take in the future, and what do screens have to do with it? Apparently the same role as Lady in the Water’s Story or Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial, the innocence that shows the way before departing for a home planet. Considering this, along with all the moody montages and atrocious Karen O songs, Her fits best, perhaps, in the sci-fi category of dystopia.
