Miss OS

Joaquin Phoenix mopes as Samantha installs in Her.

««½ Her.  Written and directed by Spike Jonze. At area theaters.         

          

Folks "love" their iPhones, and they "love" their Teslas, but what if they literally fell in love with an object, like a computer? That's the question behind Spike Jonze's silicon-based romance, Her. Sound strange? Jonze directed even odder material in Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, so you'd figure he'd propel this boy-meets-computer story in some wildly interesting directions.

          In this case, you'd figure wrongly.

          Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a still-waters-run-deep kind of guy. His sensitivity makes him perfect for his job, ghost-writing heartfelt personal letters for clients for a website called "HandwrittenLetters.com". Convincing as his fake letters are, his own emotional life is a struggle: he's still in love with the wife who's divorcing him (Rooney Mara), and he won't permit himself to get serious about anyone else. Mostly we see him moping around a near-futuristic version of Los Angeles, surfing the web, scarfing instant noodles, and feeling sorry for himself.

          Into this wasteland comes "Samantha" (voiced by Scarlett Johannson), an "artificially intelligent operating system" that Theodore installs on his computer. Needless to say, Samantha is not just an upgraded version of Siri. She's curious, she's personable, and she's adaptable, rapidly becoming the ideal mate that Theodore could never find in real life. Miraculously (or creepiest) of all, she falls for him too, and yearns for a physical body with which to consummate their relationship. Where the story goes from there had the potential to truly boggle any mind, organic or not.

          The boy-meets-girl, boy-maybe-loses-girl aspect of Her is well-handled. Phoenix finds an appealing spot between vulnerability and hope, his neediness never sliding into mush. When he falls for a disembodied voice, we believe it. Nor is it hard to imagine falling in love with Johansson's smolderingly raspy tones. If the technology ever gets good enough to produce something like Samantha, it's a good bet most straight males would find better uses for her than sorting their emails. As an offbeat sort of Valentine's Day date movie, Her is perfectly fine.

          Unfortunately, Jonze seems to have no further ambition for this story. For instance, there's the looming question of whether any artificial intelligence, no matter how cleverly programmed, can have real (as in "genuine") feelings. Jonze raises the issue in his script, and indeed takes a liberal point of view on it, by making Theodore a composer of fake emotions at his job. A computer may not have real feelings, but humans fake them pretty well too, and pretty regularly. So what's the fundamental difference?, Jonze seems to ask. Human is as human does.

          But for the most part, Jonze barely dips a toe into these deep philosophical waters. The question of Samantha's humanity is less a existential crisis than a bump in the romantic road, like discovering your supposedly perfect lover once killed a man. Meanwhile, other questions scream to be answered: if a human user is emotionally harmed in a relationship with an AI, is the software company liable for damages? Would a product recall amount to emotional abandonment? What's the agenda of a company that dares unleash such potentially "loveable" products on the market? What if it tried to use the AI to influence the behavior of their human companions (sort of the way marketers use children to sell products to their parents today)? If things go sour in your relationship with your operating system, can't you just reboot it and start over? Should you?

          Sure, even a greeting-card writer like Theodore Twombly deserves his share of happiness. But there were more interesting directions to take this idea. Jake Schreier's Robot & Frank is another recent film that covered similar ground, though it was less about love than memory and the loss of self. Of the two, Schreier's seems the less ambitious, yet it ended up going deeper into its premise than Her. Unless it's date night around Valentine's Day, I'd stay in and stream Robot & Frank instead.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro