OVP: Her (2013)

Picture: Her (2013)
Stars: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pratt
Director: Spike Jonze
Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Original Screenplay*, Score, Art Direction, Original Song-"The Moon Song")
Snap Judgement Ranking: 5/5 stars

I am not even going to get into the whole "I haven't posted a while" diatribe because, as I mentioned in the Jan Brewer post, it's been a rough month and I am determined to make March better.  That starts with me finishing off the many OVP films from the past year-I will get us a bit closer to finishing up the 2013 l (loyal readers will wonder aloud what happened to the 2009 OVP...and to them I cower in the corner, contemplating why writing about Randy Newman songs is so hard).

But on with this film, one of our last two remaining Best Pictures of 2013 to be reviewed, and easily my favorite of the two.  Most of you have likely seen the film, but for those that haven't here is that most necessary of tools: SPOILER ALERT.  The film takes place in the not-so-distant future, so not-so-distant that you could easily assume it was the present and I don't think anyone would question it.  I mean, everyone has a more meaningful relationship with their phone than the people around them and we all are far more interested in dating some version of ourselves than another, complicated human being?  Let's be honest-this is basically what our iPads have done to us.

Theodore Twombly (Phoenix...and isn't that a spectacular moniker?) is a man adrift.  A man who writes letters for lonely people incapable of expressing their feelings, he himself lives his life in isolation.  Abandoned by his childhood sweetheart (Mara) in a bitter divorce, he spends his days having dates with women who want a life he just can't seem capable of giving.  Instead, he simply devotes his life to work, video games, and the occasional hangout night with his platonic friend Amy (Adams...and doesn't it throw you when actors play characters with their same names?).  Basically, he sounds like almost every single male friend you have over the age of 28.

Eventually he decides to have a relationship with an OS (operating system) named Samantha (Johansson), which changes his life.  Here is a "woman" who is everything he always wanted-uncomplicated, real, and programmed by him.  It'd be misogynistic if Samantha didn't evolve into a fully-formed individual of her own, which she does.  As the film goes on, we see Samantha move past being Theodore's confidante into being his lover and best friend, and then eventually, being something more-a person who no longer needs him to define herself.  If it weren't for the fact that she was an OS, this would be a standard fare romantic drama about how we evolve past one another as we age.  However, the fact that she is a machine adds a fascinating element to the endeavor.

It's this element of what is real and what needs to be real that Jonze paints so well in the movie.  Frequently we find Theodore's real-life interactions with women seeming almost unnecessarily complicated.  His ex-wife cannot handle his juvenile attitude toward life.  In one of the best scenes of the movie, he has a disastrous first date with a woman named Amelia (Wilde), who is charming, beautiful, and smart.  She's a great on-paper match for Theodore, and their date goes well until she shows that she's more than the real-life Samantha: she's a woman who wants a future and doesn't want him to take advantage of her (which he seems intent on doing by sleeping with her without thinking about commitment).  It's a really odd scene in the movie until you frame it against the Samantha character and Theodore's interactions with her.

This is because the Samantha character eventually does something very similar to Theodore when she leaves him to spend her time in a universe beyond the humans.  In this case, Samantha realizes that she wants what is best for herself, and leaves Theodore, the complicated, imperfect individual, alone in the world.

The movie asks a host of rich questions throughout, and isn't afraid to try and answer them.  They want to know if someone can truly love a machine, and while that may seem absurd, think of how many people who fall in love with someone they've never met on the internet.  We have the comfort of knowing that there is someone on the other end that is a human being, but things like Cleverbot have made even that assurance seem a bit questionable.  The reality is that if we aren't already encountering some version of Samantha, many of us have facsimile relationships with a person quite similar to her.

The film also asks less hypothetical questions, though.  The movie desperately wants to know if something feels real, is it?  That's the essence behind Theodore's relationship with Samantha and how he works his way past the shame of the relationship to start to truly enjoy it.  In a world where everyone increasingly lives through computers and machines and is isolated, if we feel something is real, is it?  Or do we all have a person like Mara's ex-wife to splash cold water and bring us back to the truth?

And then of course, if you take away the technological aspects of the film, we are left with an even more important question, and one quite cliched, yet eternally unanswered-what is love?  And in this case, can it exist even if it's fleeting and possibly imaginary?

These are big questions, and Her tackles many of them in moving and beautiful ways, even if the unanswerable questions remain that way.  The film follows in the footsteps of other similarly-minded films like Lost in Translation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Once, and Weekend, and like those films, it manages to find the balance between deep meaning and personal discovery without straying into twee-ness or existential garbage.  Suffice it to say, it earned that spot at the top of the Oscar heap, and since it was not a sure thing by any stretch of the imagination, I'm glad AMPAS found room for this tiny wonder.