Movie Review – Her

Sci-fi with a strain

‘Her’ is a dream for any actor. The concept is such that you’re going to get one hundred percent screen space and that too on top of it if an actor like Joaquin Phoenix is going to get the chance, he’s going to grab it with both hands. But the highlight of the film is that the character is not meant to be eccentric. So, everything that has to be done should be human, even if it’s a futuristic world. That’s the element which makes ‘Her’ a film which we can relate to.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) does a job which is not really easy to define. I mean, that alone would take a separate short film. He writes letter for someone who can’t write letters, seriously?. I mean, what sort of job is that. That’s tougher than being a writer. But it’s one of the jobs, which many works. So, it’s not really considered an artistic skill but a regular office work. Do you get it. Yea that’s how screwed up the environment is, in the film. It’s not dystopian or anything but it’s an emotionally dystopian world.

When Theodre gets into relationship with an OS Samantha (Voice of Scarlett) it’s not as difficult as what it seems to look. He gets much more acceptance from people than what we would think, except for his wife may be. Spike Jonze has done really well to not make us feel judgmental for such a thing. He has tried his best to show the romance between Theodre and Samantha even though she doesn’t have a physical self. Especially the beach scenes and the scenes where Theodre laughs were really well made. It works beautifully for a movie watcher. But personally, I still felt distant, I couldn’t entirely connect with that idea of falling for an AI woman. It’s difficult to treat it human and not be judgmental on it. It works for small time pleasure but being in a relationship, not at all.

‘Her’ treads in this fine line throughout, the science is artistic, but not full-blown meditative art like a ‘Solaris’ or ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. That’s why it’s a film I loved for the experiment, because it happened in a way I liked, but didn’t like it as a full-blown project. The transition to that world wasn’t complete. We still tread in the line like, may be this might happen but not entirely a different world.

I wanted to watch this for so long because of Scarlett Johnson, what a disappointment it was to not see her in the film at all. But she does enough even with her voice. This is where people being familiar with her or fan of her, would be able to understand as to why. Because we can imagine everything by the way she would have reacted. Otherwise it’d have felt just like an animation. As for Joaquin phoenix too, its generally different from his much stronger roles in other films. So that too was something I was skeptical about but he showed what a master actor he is.

Spike Jonze is a maverick director. I’m not sure how people who had watched ‘Adaptation’ or ‘Being John Malkovich’ would have reacted to this movie because it doesn’t explode with ideas like that but rather melts through it. Guess this might be a personal project for him, something that he’d write in diary and not share. The film gave that feel. As a film ‘Her’ was definitely interesting but as a Spike Jonze film it’s definitely not to the level of an ‘Adaptation’ or ‘Being John Malkovich’.