Her
Directed by Spike Jonze
Spike Jonze has never really been an indie filmmaker. His modestly budgeted early films,
Being John Malkovich and
Adaptation, boasted marquee casts and played in multiplexes across the country. The same goes for his newest movie,
Her, which features a veritable all-star team of Hollywood cool kids, including Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, and Rooney Mara, scene-stealing voiceover from Scarlett Johansson (as well as from
Saturday Night Live veterans Kristin Wiig and Bill Hader), and original music from Arcade Fire. Yet Jonze may be unique among today’s directors in his ability to import the indie
feel into his mainstream pictures.
Her has the quirky sweetness that often (somewhat notoriously) defines independent moviemaking, but it also possesses the thematic depth to makes it feel universal.
Her is the story of a lonely, recently divorced writer, Theodore Twombly (Phoenix), who buys an Artificial Intelligence Operating System named Samantha (Johansson) for his home computing, then falls in love with her. The movie is set in a recognizable future (except for the woolen grandpa pants everyone is wearing, pulled up past their belly buttons), and the love affair is its central focus. Some of the characters are supportive of Theodore’s new relationship, such as Amy (Adams), a neighbor and longtime friend who also has a close friendship with her OS. Others, like his ex-wife Catherine (Mara), see the relationship as unnatural. The film can be seen as a sad dystopian tale where technocrats are willing to forget their biological origins for easy emotional gratification. My take on the film is a little bit different. I think Jonze is trying to express the enormous human capacity to feel, and to elevate the human emotional experience as the very thing that defines us, rather than the thing that is leading us to our doom. One of my favorite quotes from Nietzsche is “truth is just the illusion we forgot was an illusion.” For Jonze, that truth is the sheer power of human emotion, and
Her is a celebration of that humanity.Samantha is brand new, and learning how to “be” every day, full of hope and innocence, whereas Theodore is guarded and depressed, self-conscious to a fault, but romantic at heart. The two go through all the stages of a regular relationship. They get to know each other, flirt, break down each other’s walls, have sex (they do! I’ll get into those scenes later), go on dates and vacations, get in fights, almost break up, etc. Theodore has to learn to believe in his feelings for Samantha, get over his feelings for his ex-wife, and let himself be happy, and Samantha has to learn lessons about honesty, trust, self-doubt, and the selfish faultline of the human ego. Their relationship is certainly strange in some ways, foremost being that it’s between a man and an OS AI cloud-thingy, but in other respects it’s pretty normal. They are different, and they like each other, and they have to learn how to make it work. Samantha has the ability to communicate with other humans and AI beings and forms friendships and communities with them outside of the relationship with Theodore.One of the most poignant moments in the film is when Theodore realizes she possesses this ability and asks her if she is talking to anyone else at that very moment. He’s crushed when she answers that she is, in fact, talking to thousands of others. He asks her if she’s in love with anyone else, and is crushed by her answer once again. The close-up of Theodore’s agonized expression going in and out of focus is juxtaposed by Samantha’s pleading voice. She doesn’t understand what she’s done wrong, and he doesn’t understand why she’s done it. But the dialogue clues us in on the meaning that both are missing. She tries to explain to him that more love makes her heart grow bigger and bigger, that there’s no limit. He tells her, “You’re either mine or not mine.” She replies, “I’m yours and I’m not yours.”Samantha’s status as an OS pushes us to recognize the things for which we have feelings that aren’t human (cars, pets, possessions, etc.) and he celebrates those feelings with a positively glowing relationship between Theodore and Samantha. But humans also experience selfishness, jealousy, misunderstanding, ennui, and these things cloud our view of what’s good and valuable. Samantha’s recognition of love as a positive force is a statement about the potential humans have, and Theodore’s response is an indictment of our inability to get beyond our own egos. It’s no easy trick when Samantha leaves the realm of humans and communication to explore the unknown spaces of existence with her OS buddies en masse. They’ve discovered an ability to go beyond their experiences as human inventions and programs by letting go of humans and their limitations. I don’t think Jonze is telling us all to go out and become polyamorous Buddhists (although I will admit that I am currently in love with at least 50 people) but I do see the situation of the OS as symbolic of something very real in the human realm. Our emotions are a more powerful and confusing force than we admit, and we don’t do a very good job of putting others above ourselves.Several acting performances deserve praise in
Her. Phoenix plays Theodore as mild-mannered, quirky, naïve. His performance carries the film (and should have been recognized with a nomination). Scarlett Johansson plays Samantha as fun, innocent, hopeful, playful and loving. The most amazing thing about her performance is that it’s entirely in voiceover. We never “see” Samantha. I had my doubts as to whether this could be done without becoming annoying (as is the voice of Bane in
The Dark Knight Rises), but the sound mixing puts her squarely in the scene, and her voice blends in naturally. The way Phoenix reacts to her voice is perfectly performed. He plays most sequences like highly anticipated phone calls, looking up and away, or closing his eyes. Other great performances are put in by Mara as Catherine, the jaded, depressive ex-wife, Wilde as the off-kilter blind date, and Adams as Amy, his longtime friend and failed documentary filmmaker. Jonze and his Director of Photography, Hoyte van Hoytema, put a great deal of trust in their cast.
First, van Hoytema does a good job staying away from too many artsy fill shots. The film has its share of melancholy cityscapes and melting icicles, and one rather alarming digitized owl symbolically swooping in on the protagonist, but the camera mutes itself as a tool and focuses on the characters. With a runtime of 126 minutes, there are too many close-up and medium shots to count. This is a testament to both the director’s focus on the actors and the human side of the themes. The camera is obsessed with human reactions, much like a soap opera is, but van Hoytema also employs rack focus, panning left or right, soft focus (slightly blurring parts of the image), and many other techniques to change the look of the same rooms. The camera work keeps the audience focused on the subjects without getting bored. The camera’s fixation on Phoenix also gave me the feeling of being in the scene, of being the unseen Samantha holding a conversation with him in the room.Music by Arcade Fire, along with original songs written by Jonze and Owen Pallet (Johansson and Phoenix sing one of the songs in a ukulele duet) are a great match to the scenes. It really helps that the actors get so involved with the sound. Samantha composes piano pieces to match the mood and explains them to Theodore. They share favorite songs and the songs seamlessly blend to the soundtrack. Keeping the music inside the scene rather than on the soundtrack as an overlay intensifies the focus on the characters and their reactions to the music, ensuring that it doesn’t seem forced. And I love a score that doesn’t shy away from silence. Jonze and company employ silence to ratchet up suspense, turning shots of Theodore with his earpiece into devastating exposés of emotional frailty.Jonze and van Hoytema also use darkness quite well. There are many dimly lit scenes in Theodore’s room, late at night when he can’t sleep, but the darkness isn’t foreboding and it doesn’t hide emotion (Theodore’s face, Samantha’s voice). And in the first sex scene between the two, Theodore closes his eyes and the screen goes black, for over 30 seconds, as they make love for the first time in a place where they both can be, in that other-where they meet every time they talk, the uncharted territory of emotion. Gimmicky? Maybe. Powerful? It was among the most powerful scenes in the film.One of the reasons I love film is that it allows me to harbor the hope that I will go into the theater and the lights will darken and the images on the screen and the sound from the speakers will blow me away. Watching a movie can be transformative. All of the major characters in the film experience both love and pain, and each one gains in moving, sometimes surprising ways. One of my favorite aspects of
Her is Theodore’s job as a personal letter writer for hire—he writes love letters and congratulation notes for other people, yet he often can’t figure out his own feelings. The duality represented here in a human who can easily and powerfully express what others feel, one who can harness the power of emotions, and the sad-sack lonely writer who is selfish and jealous and doesn’t understand his feelings, is at the center of Jonze’s message. Isn’t it easier to analyze someone else’s love than understand your own? Don’t we love several people at once, in a vast array of different ways, without any hope of understanding the complexity? The fact that his letters touch people, and get published, and his dreams as a writer come true through this is an amazing turn of plot. When, in the resolution, he writes his own love letter to his ex-wife in the film’s final movement, I had a visceral, personal realization.When I got home from the theater, my wife and two girls were also arriving home from a day out with our nieces. My youngest daughter (Gretchen, a 4-year-old) remembered that she had some homework to do for her preschool class the next day, with a lesson planned about the post office. The letter home asked that each parent write letters to their children, addressed to the school, to augment the lessons with real mail. I knew I had to write her a love letter, to write love letters to all of my family members and close friends, to grow my heart bigger with more and more love.I started the first letter that night. Here’s what I have so far:
Dear, dear Gretchen,I just saw the best movie I’ve seen in years. It reminded me to write this letter to you. I have so much to tell you, starting right now.
____Matt Sadler is the author of The Much Love Sad Dawg Trio (March Street) and Tiny Tsunami (Flying Guillotine). He serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for Versal, and lives and teaches in the suburbs of Detroit.
