It’s hard to imagine someone more affecting than Phoenix in the role. Heaven! Theodore, thirsty for companionship, drinks Samantha in. She cleans up his mess and then tells him he’s funny. With Theodore’s permission, she analyzes thousands of his e-mails (in less than a second) and dumps all but the 80 or so she identifies as important. But right from the start she’s a dream mate, especially for a writer. Does it hurt or help that we can visualize her? I’m not certain. It’s girlish, throaty, slightly cracked-the voice of someone next to you in bed. Johansson’s is the least mechanical imaginable. (Morton is credited as an associate producer at a Q&A I saw, Jonze told the audience that “her DNA” was all over the film.) Perhaps Jonze decided that with Morton the film was too chilly, that he needed a voice that was fully, seductively human. The actress Samantha Morton was the original voice of Samantha, and replacing her with Scarlett Johansson was obviously a momentous decision. In Stephen Sondheim’s phrase, “it’s a city of strangers.” And its denizens eagerly embrace a new kind of OS, “an intuitive entity” - in the words of an advertisement - “that listens to you and understands you and knows you.” The palette isn’t cold or conventionally dystopian - Theodore’s office is a cheerful Candyland-but the architecture has no connection to the people who stroll through faceless plazas gazing into electronic devices, talking to unseen listeners. (His only recourse is Internet sex with other lonely souls - one, voiced by Kristen Wiig, an epic loon.) Jonze shot exteriors in Shanghai, with its vast, abstracted skyline. He’s in mourning for a wife (Rooney Mara) who left him for reasons that remain vague - the two simply fell out of synch. The irony is that he can’t express himself so directly in life. We’re in Los Angeles some decades in the future (the year is unspecified), where Theodore has a job writing cards and letters for other people - intimate, sometimes erotic, based on intuition and empathy. It opens as if it’s going to be a grim satire of our social-media-saturated lives and paradoxical isolation. The movie itself must have taken Jonze to places he didn’t expect. The result is a love story both daft and amazingly lucid. He feels her evolving beyond his grasp - like a real person, only in faster and more dizzying increments. Along with his protagonist, a lonely writer named Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), he watches Samantha wrestle with her new feelings and ideas. I’m guessing that when Jonze came up with his high concept - a man falls in love with a sort of thirtieth-generation “Siri” - he couldn’t predict what his “Her” would do. The “OS” names herself (“itself” feels wrong) “Samantha” and grows more and more human, meaning less and less certain. He wrote it as if he were following the voice of his title character, a computer operating system that sounds like a breathy young woman. The writer-director Spike Jonze gets beautifully lost in Her.
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