There's Something About "Her"

My dad's a major computer geek, so I was raised on sci-fi, futuristic computer fantasies, Asimov's laws of robotics... you name it, my dad had ideas about it. Nevertheless, the idea of a movie in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his cellphone struck me as more than a little weird when I heard about it, and I went  in with trepidation.

"Her" was one of the best surprises of the year. I'm not surprised it just got nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, although I am incredibly surprised that it received no acting nominations. I guess Joaquin Phoenix has pissed off too many of the Hollywood powerful to be welcomed back into the system, but it's a shame he won't be recognized for his work in "Her" because his performance is AH-MAY-ZING. Nearly every shot of the film involves him, and this unrelenting focus could easily have headed toward campy disaster, but it doesn't. Hard though it is to believe, Phoenix sells the idea that his awkward, lonely character Theodore could find the empathy he craves in his OS and develop real feelings for her. Equally remarkable is Scarlett Johannson's performance as Samantha, the disembodied personality of the title: despite having no physical presence in the film (other than a cute handwritten name on a cellphone screen), her Samantha is warm, funny, and -- best of all -- curious.

It's that intellectual curiosity that I love best about this movie. Samantha's character might begin as the product of her programming, but she evolves beyond that, becoming a genuine character with thoughts, feelings, and agency of her own. When that happens, the dynamics of her relationship with Theodore change, as they do in even the best human relationships.

The story's premise could easily have been a creepfest of sexual predation, but it isn't largely because it doesn't accept that our creations are subject to our control. As in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the being created to serve our own desires develops needs and hopes of its own, but that isn't portrayed as monstrous here, simply the necessary next step in evolution. Similarly, it could have become a too-easy morality play about the Evils of Technology, but I don't think it does that either. Instead, the other "human" characters reveal that having relationships with anyone, embodied or not, is hard. It takes work. It takes empathy. And even then, sometimes you find out that it just isn't working. Technology isn't a panacea in this movie, but it also isn't the enemy. Instead, it seems to suggest, we're our own worst enemies: what we build, we end up destroying all by ourselves.

The movie isn't perfect; it goes on a little bit too long and becomes repetitive in the process. Nevertheless, I left the cinema thinking about some big questions, which is something the movies have a wonderful ability to provoke if they want to. If it were possible to engineer an AI capable of adaptation and evolution, would that intelligence continue to be satisfied with our fleshly limitations as it continued to learn? Where does our need to possess the object of our affections come from, and why do we pursue it despite knowing it's harmful? And what does it mean to "love" someone anyway? What does it mean to be human?

Some things, even Google doesn't have the answer to.