Her is the best film of the year by a so-wide margin. It’s gorgeous, funny, deep — and I can hear some smart aleck say, “If you love it so much, why don’t you marry it?” Let me tell you, I’d like to!
I certainly identify with the protagonist, Theodore Twombly, who falls in love with his computer operating system, his OS, which calls itself — sorry, I gotta say “who calls herself” — Samantha, and who sounds like a breathy young woman.
When Her begins, it doesn’t seem as if it’s going to be a romance but a sci-fi social satire, set in an unspecified future Los Angeles in which the architecture has no connection to people — they stroll through faceless plazas gazing into electronic devices, talking to unseen listeners. People eagerly embrace a new kind of OS — what an ad calls “an intuitive entity that listens to you and understands you and knows you.”
Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, and it’s the performance of the year. The character has a job writing cards and letters on behalf of other people — intimate, sometimes erotic. The irony is, he can’t find words to communicate with people in his life. He’s in mourning for a wife, played by Rooney Mara, who left him for reasons remaining vague; they simply fell out of sync. He’s desperately lonely.
Phoenix wears glasses and a thick mustache, but behind his Groucho mask he’s wide open. He’s the kind of actor who works to get himself into a state where he loses his emotional bearings, which sometimes means he doesn’t connect with other actors. But in Her, he’s meant to be all by himself, responding to Samantha’s voice, and the performance is like a free-form solipsistic dance. It’s not pure solipsism, because Samantha exists. But you might be watching a 4-year-old talking to an imaginary friend; it’s that inward.