In which I am uncharacteristically honest and sensitive.
Director: Spike Jonze
Writer: Spike Jonze
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Chris Pratt, Olivia Wilde
Runtime: 126 mins.
2013
I try to sound smart on my movie blog. I try to identify and engage with what I deem to be the key aspects of any given movie. I talk about things I know a little bit about, like performance or story. I talk about things I really know nothing about, like sound design or editing or cinematography. I try to be honest. But perhaps more than that I try not to sound stupid or inane.
I do this because I'm afraid of being wrong. That has always been my fear. So I try to make ironclad arguments instead of tossing out a bunch of unsystematic sensory impressions. Sometimes, during the act of watching a movie, I am already formulating what sort of points or narrative I want to craft in a potential future post.
That's probably the right tactic for a movie blog, but it's not the conversation I want to have about Her. The golden rule of criticism should be to approach a piece of art or entertainment on its own terms, and evaluate how successful it is within those parameters. As I was watching Her, it became apparent that the right way to talk about the movie would be to share how it impacted me on a personal level.
Her is by far the most sensitive story concerning a romantic relationship that I have ever seen. This sci-fi-rom-com about a man's relationship with a sentient operating system that begins life uniquely shaped to his needs but grows and evolves with time and experience, manages to be the most human relationship drama I've seen since Wall-E (also about robots...).
I have this theory about how we change over time. It's not that our five-year-old self has been obliterated by the years, and we are now fully our (in my case) twenty-one-year-old self. Rather, I think of each year like a fresh layer that surrounds the previous self. So our five-year-old self is still buried deep in there, not manifest but still informing who we are today, like tree rings, or the layers of an onion (obligatory Shrek reference).
I think about this sometimes in terms of romantic relationships, which are one of our great human mysteries. Why do so many relationships shrivel up and wither away? Or shatter into tiny shards? Or continue on, begrudgingly, maintained by sheer willpower, spite, and malice? It's happened to most of us. I've experienced a collapsing romantic relationship, as well as my fair share of dying friendships, and they all feature a feeling of simultaneous stubbornness and helplessness: a belief that no matter what you will salvage the relationship, combined with a sinking realization that your separation will be slow but inevitable, like a fracturing Pangaea.
The tree ring metaphor makes some sense of this--the two lovers fell in love with rings that are now buried deep under the accumulation of bark and time. That's great in theory. But so many unanswerable questions linger in the aftermath. Can two people ever really know each other? Would we even want to? Why do we try?
Her wrestles with all of those questions, and then some, far more subtly and ably than I could aspire to here. It never feels reductive, condescending, or cliched. That's because above all, beyond all the sci-fi and rom-com trappings, beyond the amazing world and the jokes and the social commentary, this movie is the story of the very real relationship between two people.
Part of the reason it would feel unfair for me to dissect this movie critically is that, more than any other movie I can remember watching in the last five or ten years, I was completely immersed in the experience of Her. I was in it. The central conflict resonated so intimately with me. Theodore's (Joaquin Phoenix) character speaks my heart more than any other movie character in recent memory.
At any rate, watching Her was amazing for me because when I reacted, it didn't feel like I was reacting to characters. It felt like I was interacting with them personally. When Samantha the OS (the highly underrated Scarlett Johansson) makes an absurd observation, I laughed as if she were speaking to me. When Theodore had an emotional breakthrough, or said something charming, I smiled as if it were said to me. When a character was remembering something, I felt like it was resurfacing in my mind. When Theodore shared about his scarring romantic past, or Samantha laid a personal existential crisis bare, I felt as if I were living through their experiences, my eyes welling with theirs (well... his). My emotions don't rise easily. For me, Her was the ultimate experience of generating empathy--the highest function of art. There are no villains here. I love all the characters for their quirks and their failures.
In addition to all that, Her is funny as hell. It's gorgeous. It's smart. Its music is unbearably beautiful. It's sincere, which is so rare. It has your emotions in its pocket--happy, sad, fulfilled, bereft. It's a movie that means something real to me, despite the slight unreality of its setting. It's a movie I will be struggling with for a long time.
It's the kind of movie I want to watch with everyone I ever love.
5 / 5 BLOBS
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