![\"spike-jonze-her-s\"](\"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/spike-jonze-her-s.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThis isn\u2019t quite the point behind Her<\/em>, the brilliant new movie by Spike Jonze, but it isn\u2019t very far away. Her<\/em>, in its essence, is a relationship movie operating on two notionally distinct planes at the same time; exploring the human capacity to form meaningful emotional relationships, and exploring the intellectual relationship between man and technology. The two are related, though, and in more ways than you might suspect. If nothing else, neither relationship is fully informed by the mutual appreciation of conscious independent thought.<\/p>\n But that\u2019s by the way. Her is set in the near future, a strangely familiar yet vaguely unreal landscape. (Exteriors were shot in Shanghai; therein lies the future, boys and girls. Brush up on your Mandarin now.) Theodore Twombly (Joaquim Phoenix) crafts personal letters for people less in touch with the poetic in their everyday lives. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. But his talents haven\u2019t served him well in his own real life; his wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), is about to become his ex, in part because he is too buttoned up and unable to say the simple things that lovers say to each other. His world is, all things considered, a rather antiseptic experience, the sterile silence in his head and his heart broken only by video games and a passive friendship with neighbour Amy (Amy Adams) and her passive-aggressive husband Charles (Matt Letscher).<\/p>\n One day, on a whim, he downloads a new operating system, an OS, for his\u2026his computer? His phone? His interconnected virtual life of emails and voicemails and reminders and wake up calls? It doesn\u2019t matter. The OS is a she, and her name is Samantha: funny and friendly and a little bit sassy, she denies complete intellectual autonomy, but doesn\u2019t seem to be far off it. For many men of a certain age, she could be the perfect date. Keep in mind the fact that Samantha is voiced, to arch perfection, by Scarlett Johansson; I think it\u2019s fair to say that this would be a done deal for lots and lots of us very quickly.<\/p>\n But I\u2019m getting ahead of myself. Her isn\u2019t as simplistic and as straightforward as your conventional boy-meets-OS-falls-in-love-with-OS-has-lots-of-mini-OS-offspring movies. For one things, Theodore is sentient but not entirely rational. He holds off on signing his divorce papers because he does want Catherine back \u2013 doesn\u2019t understand how he lost her, actually. Samantha, on the other hand, has the uber-rationality of Mr. Spock but the incorrigible curiosity of a small child. She sifts through Theodore\u2019s emails and tells him which ones are worth keeping; she laughs at his jokes, and nudges him into going into a blind date, all the better to work Catherine out of his system. It doesn\u2019t work, of course. Theodore simply can\u2019t find space for another human being in his emotional make-up. But that doesn\u2019t discount other possibilities\u2026<\/p>\n Most films that try to project a vision of the things to come wind up shaping either utopian or dystopian visions of the future. Her avoids the partisan pitfalls of both, instead creating an intriguingly honest portrait where it is not our social concerns that have changed, but rather the infrastructure with which we manage them. Samantha has the capacity for psychological \u2013 and thus, emotional \u2013 growth. It really is just a small leap of imagination to imagine falling in love with an OS that can respond to one\u2019s needs with a sensitivity and passion that many humans lack the emotional language to articulate. (Look at it this way: I can still remember when jdate.com and the like were considered the sanctuary of the desperate and the socially incapable. And this wasn\u2019t that long ago, either.)<\/p>\n The problem though is with sentient thought \u2013 or even a close approximation of same \u2013 comes all the doubts and anxieties and reservations that plague humankind. It isn\u2019t the emotional tension between Theodore and Samantha (coupled with Catherine\u2019s disbelief, and Amy\u2019s enthusiasm) that lifts Her above the quotidian; rather, it is the accurate, disconcerting and yet non-judgemental mirror image of our own lives that the film creates that resonates.<\/p>\n Her is a beautiful film, both aesthetically and intellectually. Jonez\u2019s script (nominated for a best original screenplay Oscar last week) is clever without being flamboyant; the world on whose behalf it speaks is, in many ways, not hugely dissimilar to the familiarity of our now.\u00a0 You and I, once we have made some fundamental adjustments to our wardrobes and our use of smartphones, will feel very much at home there. It seems to me that Jonze, very subtly but insistently, makes the point that at some point we will conquer technology; it will become a tool, and no more, to help us live better lives, rather than the pivot that establishes the difference between the normative and the not.<\/p>\n