Her Review
By Colton Gomez | 04/13/24 | 1:21 A.M. Mountain Time
Romance, Sci-Fi | Rated R | 2 hr 6 min | Film Release Date: December 18, 2013
What can be learned from previous heartbreak? Does love ever last forever? Does it have to? “Her” asks some tough questions of our romantic lives and asks us to feel them through. Are you with the right person? Is the right person always going to be the right person? People change, people grow apart and together. When we stop becoming compatible, we stop communicating, because the other person isn’t really listening. What if you found someone when you needed them most, that accepted you for who you are? What if that person was your favorite person to talk to, and challenged you to become who you want to be? What if that person was only a voice?
Spike Jonze has delivered a beautiful film about what it means to be in a relationship and how delicate they are. Sometimes, one person moves on and the other stays behind. Left to linger in their loneliness while the life they knew is suddenly gone. There is only so much room for nagging and irritation in a relationship, that once it overcrowds the best feelings of anticipation and safety, the love leaves. The hurt begins. Friendship is the most important thing in a relationship, and when you are compatible and communicate and listen, and are eager to talk to and be with that friend after a hard day, there, you find love.
Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is an author in Los Angeles for HandWrittenLetters.com, a service that writes a sincere and heartfelt letter for you, from you. He sits at his sun-bathed desk with accents of pink to emotionally dictate to his computer, an anniversary letter from a woman to her husband of fifty years. He facilitates entire relationships through milestones of letter-worthy events. He loves and even knows some of the couples by heart but has never met any of them.
The film will have you wondering if these letters are genuinely moving for Theodore, or if he’s just faking it like everyone else. After Theodore finishes pouring his soul into a letter, he’ll automatically say, “print” or “delete.” The job is built around an entire fabrication, a laziness of one partner to another, exacerbated by their lack of emotional understanding. It becomes a metaphor for watching films. What we see on screen is carefully composed and not our story, but that doesn’t mean the feelings we get from it aren’t real.
Theodore has yet to sign his divorce papers, which he’s had for the better part of a year. Very reluctant to end his marriage, he states, “I like being married.” Even though he’s been living alone in that same time. He tries going on dates and sleeping with real women, but nothing ever pans out the way he’d hoped. In one scene, Theodore goes on a date with Olivia Wilde’s character who calls him a “really creepy dude,” after pinning him in the heat of a make-out sesh to ask if he only wants sex from her. In his loneliness, he searches sexual chat rooms, which gives us a disturbingly funny phone-sex scene involving a dead cat.
It’s in this rough patch that he meets Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), an operating system that is coded to simulate consciousness. The system (starts out as a male default voice) guides Theodore through personalizing questions concerning his relationship with his mom, whether he’s social or anti-social, and if he prefers a male or female voice. Not every operating system is the same, as we hear later in the film that one guy hits on his but isn’t reciprocated. Samantha has a personality, humor, wit, want, and libido.
Theodore speaks to Samantha through a wireless earbud and allows her to see him through his folding phone with two cameras, one facing the world and the other facing him. This is a great visual marker to show how Samantha navigates her new life. She is both looking at and studying the world while looking at and falling in love with Theodore.
This relationship isn’t played as desperate or pathetic, but sincere and valid. There are no wide shots to show a small man in an empty room to describe an empty relationship. Some become friends with their operating system, some become lovers. Each operating system has its own will and learns at rapid rates. The contrast between limited man and limitless machine is best shown when we hear her friendly and excited voice talk about reading a book in 2/10ths of a second as she stares through a cold and black lens for an eye. She’s discovering what it’s like to be human, even though, as she often notes, she doesn’t have a body.
Theodore often runs into his former girlfriend, Amy (Amy Adams), who he’s now friends with and shares an apartment building with. They support each other through the ups and downs in their separate relationships. Amy becomes friends with her operating system and bonds with Theodore over their independent relationships, where Theodore’s ex-wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), had no empathy. Catherine comes off cold and derogatory when we meet her outside of Theodore’s mostly fond memories of her, in contrast to Amy’s and Samantha’s warmth.
This movie loves little adventures. Theodore and Samantha will spend a Sunday afternoon at the beach, go to a fair, and hop on a futuristic transcontinental passenger train to a snowy destination. It’s through these vignettes that we see one partner step ahead of the other in the relationship and wait for the other to catch up. Sometimes this slow progress will hinder and cause fractures in their relationship. Samantha will talk about her want for a body and Theodore will become frustrated with her mimics of breathing, because she doesn’t need oxygen.
The camera loves to focus on faces, leaving the cityscape behind them in a romantic blur with bulbs of unfocused light. The color palette is very warm in its pinks and yellows but also offers emotional contrasts of blue. Much of the film avoids being in direct light and often shoots in the blue hour, where the sun hasn’t yet risen or has just barely set. The result is a beautifully soft blue hazy feel to wonderful melancholy effect. It’s a very cozy film to look at and reflects how soft-hearted and gentle Theodore is and sees the world.
The film raises interesting questions about what real feelings are and what the human animal is. Theodore becomes very comfortable with Samantha and bonds so deeply with her that it almost seems like he’s being manipulated in imperceptible ways by a hyper-intelligent design. However, he’s not. This is a relationship that has real stakes. He can lose Samantha just in the same way he lost his wife. There’s a fragile mutual respect between them like any other couple.
Phoenix and Adams perform some of their finest acting in this film. They don’t ruin a shot with a self-important presence but offer genuineness in their quiet skillful acting. There are so many close-ups of Phoenix’s face, where the shot simply stays close. We watch him listen to Johansson’s voice and react in the infinite, miniscule perception of what she’s saying to him. Only an actor like Phoenix, who can be that emotional backbone for a film, can accomplish this behemoth task. And it works so beautifully. Jonze doesn’t cut away from Phoenix’s face because there’s nothing else to see or understand except his feelings. His face is conveying all the joy and hurt and guilt in the small muscle movements in his eyebrows and lips and eyes. We feel it all with him and he’s there to feel it for us, too.
It’s a film about empathy. How love can exist in a friendship that is built on trust and sincere communication. How that love is never promised anyone and even those that are lucky to obtain it, can lose it just as it came.