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Trailer: Her


PT2M20S 620 349

Reviewer rating:

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

This is not the first time somebody in a movie has got romantic with a creature endowed with artificial intelligence. Harrison Ford provided the classic case when he grumpily fell in love with a replicant in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

But Joaquin Phoenix makes an even greater leap of the sexual imagination in Spike Jonze's new film, Her. Samantha, the computer-generated creation who captures his affections, is disembodied. She's the voice of the computer operating system he has just downloaded as his diary, alarm clock and general organiser. It's as if he had fallen for Apple's Siri - a comparison that Siri's programmers are currently exploiting with a spoof video in which Siri expresses her disdain for her fictional rival. I guess you could call it the product placement deal you have when you don't have a product placement deal.

It's Jonze's first solo script and although not in the same class as the wonderful Being John Malkovich, which launched his and writer Charlie Kaufman's careers in feature filmmaking in 1999, it achieves a similarly adept piece of artistic manipulation, managing to be completely absurd while neatly catching the spirt of the times.

But what times? There's a good question. We're either in the near future or in some undefined post-modern zone where fashion sense has no place. Phoenix's Theodore Twombly favours primary colours for all occasions while Amy Adams, cast as Amy, his friend since college, looks as if she's dressed for a country weekend with Hercule Poirot. But there's something very topical about Theodore's job. He spends his days composing letters for online clients who can't summon up the words. Love, sympathy, gratitude and grief are beyond them. As a result, they call on Theodore and his colleagues to find the words.

Off-duty, however, Theodore suffers from the same inhibitions as his customers. He drifts along amiably - and Phoenix is an expert in this department - often pausing to reflect on what seems to be nothing much. To be fair, he is mourning the end of his marriage to Catherine (Rooney Mara), a much more forceful character, who has lost patience with the tepidness towards anything more demanding than tapping a keyboard. Then he downloads Samantha. Everything changes.

Samantha probably owes her name to Samantha Morton, who was originally cast as the all-important voice. At some point in the filming, Jonze switched to Scarlett Johansson, who combines husky eroticism with boundless enthusiasm. She's also the perfect listener, never nagging or judging. With her voice in his ear, Theodore suddenly discovers a new reason for waking up in the morning.

An alert should sound - but it doesn't - when she tells him she's still evolving. We know from every android movie we've ever seen that artificial intelligence can encompass ruthless ambition and so Theodore begins to learn more than he ever wanted to know about the trickiness of cyberspace's emotional terrain.

One of the great joys of Being John Malkovich was its matter-of-fact tone. Kaufman's wildly inventive script would not have been nearly as funny without the deadpan grace of Jonze's direction. He negotiated its most bizarre twists as if dealing with the tropes to be found every week in a domestic sitcom. And he displays the same uninflected style here. The difference is that the story isn't nearly as rich and its characters lack the verve necessary to drive it along at the pace it needs. Those in Malkovich were maddened by a lust for celebrity, along with the power that fame bestows.

In contrast, Theodore and his friends are numbed by a reluctance to grapple with anyone or anything. Nor are there enough of them. Adams' bright-eyed rapport with the camera is usually enough to see her through any role she takes on but it's dimmed here by the perfunctoriness of Jonze's writing in the few scenes in which she appears.

When we meet her, she's about to be freed from a dull marriage to a man who shares her clothes sense, but she never gets a chance to extract this sub-plot's potential for humour. The other women in Theodore's life are treated in an even more cursory manner.

Olivia Wilde is seen briefly as a girl on a blind date with Theo. Portia Doubleday is called upon by Samantha to be her surrogate on a date with him. By this means, Samantha reasons, she'll at least get some idea of what it would it be like to have sex with him. It's a set-up bristling with ironic possibilities but Jonze unaccountably fails to have fun with it.

The film is at its most artful during the wind-up when Theodore has to face the fact that his CGI love is evolving emotionally at a dizzying rate. Implicit in this discovery is the discomforting thought that CGI creations might not only become smarter than us, they might also become capable of having a much better time.

Twitter: @SandraHFilm


Written and directed by Spike Jonze

Rated MA, 126 minutes