{"id":1444,"date":"2014-02-15T23:35:09","date_gmt":"2014-02-15T23:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1444"},"modified":"2014-02-15T23:37:12","modified_gmt":"2014-02-15T23:37:12","slug":"oscars-2014-her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2014\/02\/15\/oscars-2014-her\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2014 – Her"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tumblr_mwegtxKybm1so4uy2o1_500\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Some spoilers \u2013 be warned.<\/span><\/p>\n

As previously noted<\/a>, I thought this was a dreadful idea for a movie. Electric Dreams<\/i> seemed facile and absurd in 1984, but computers being so much more commonplace in 2014, we know so much more about their strengths and limitations now which makes a movie like this very, very tricky to pull off. Anyone who has talked to Siri for any length of time will no doubt have been delighted by the wit of some of the reponses and will also have been frustrated by the system\u2019s inability to parse what would seem like very simple instructions to another human.<\/p>\n

And yet, from this thinnest and seemingly most unproductive of premises, Spike Jonze as writer and director has created something rather magical. This sweet, sad, odd, funny, charming, moving film is by no means perfect but it is one of the most purely original and beguiling films of the year, and I think earns its place come Oscar time, albeit in the \u201calso-ran\u201d category.<\/p>\n

The pitch is as follows \u2013 sometime in the near future, when trousers are worn extremely high and writing sappy letters on behalf of other people is a full-time job, a new operating system will be developed which has full artificial intelligence and which is expressly designed to interact with you. Theodore Twombly, whose personal life is a disaster, purchases and installs this software, creating a virtual companion for himself, named Samantha, whom he proceeds to fall in love with.<\/p>\n

There are numerous pitfalls here for an unwary director. The first is to make the software convincing. By beginning the story in a future world, where video games take up half the living room and where natural language interaction is the usual way of issuing instructions to personal computers, Jonze creates a very useful credibility stepping-stone from the limitations of today\u2019s devices to the unlimited processing powers of Samantha. The second is to avoid it being creepy. If we feel like Samantha is a made-to-order psychological prostitute, we will lose sympathy for the lead character very quickly. Jonze carefully lays the groundwork, confronting Twombly with a genuine creep in the form of a very funny voice-only cameo from Kristen Wiig as one \u201cSexyKitten\u201d whom Twombly meets in an online sex chat room. But he is also helped enormously by Joaquin Phoenix\u2019s performance, which is suitably off-kilter \u2013 a straight-arrow leading man actor like Matt Damon or Tom Cruise kills the movie dead \u2013 but also achingly vulnerable and uncertain.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also clear that \u2013 as far as Jonze is concerned \u2013 this isn\u2019t really a science fiction movie. The world-building is all relegated to the background, we have no idea what breakthroughs have made this technology possible, and the details of how \u201cSamantha\u201d works are glossed over (the interview which the installer conducts is over with almost before it\u2019s begun\u00a0\u2013\u00a0this isn\u2019t a made-to-order perfect woman unless the company has been spying on Twombly for months). And there\u2019s no broadening of the scope of the story to show, for example, the company which created this software getting wiped out on the stock exchange when all the sentient OSes suddenly decide to \u201cleave\u201d. Sometimes, this refusal to remove the narrative blinkers is a weakness. When Samantha goes off-line, leaving Twombly to panic and rush his hand-set to the IT emergency room, she blithely replies on her return that she had sent him an email informing him of her forthcoming absence. Fine, but how is he expected to read an email without an operating system?<\/p>\n

However, when the ramifications of this \u201cmagic bean\u201d intersect with the human drama which is unfolding, then the follow-through is admirably thorough. Human\/OS romantic relationships are, if not taken for granted, certainly expected and talked about. Of course! Of course Theodore wouldn\u2019t be the only one to become intimate with his gracefully personal personal assistant. An OS has more in common with another OSes than with a human master. Of course! And of course they would be able to communicate effortlessly with each other in this connected world.<\/p>\n

The limited scope of the movie puts a lot of weight on a relatively small cast. As well as Phoenix, Jonze casts Rooney Mara as Twombly\u2019s ex-wife, Chris Pratt as his work buddy, Olivia Wilde as his blind date, Amy Adams as his best gal-pal and \u2013 apparently \u2013 a 25-year-old David Hyde Pierce as her husband. All do excellent work, especially Wilde who makes the most of a two-scene cameo. Amy Adams is on fine form too, far less glamorous then in\u00a0American Hustle<\/em> but equally compelling.<\/p>\n

As Twombly blunders through misunderstanding after crass remark, he is permitted some moments of happiness, even joy, in Samantha\u2019s company and Scarlett Johansson also does lovely work as the voice of the software. It\u2019s these scenes which give us hope for the future. Twombly\u2019s relationship with his computer may have been a horribly misguided, fucked-up, dead end (nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the extraordinary scene where Samantha procures a sexual surrogate to consummate her and Theodore\u2019s love) but it helped heal some wounds, and Theodore ends the film if not having been made whole then at least having learned to feel again, to laugh again, to share again.<\/p>\n

With a lovely and very distinctive soundtrack from Canadian band Arcade Fire, Her<\/i> is a very carefully controlled piece of work \u2013 delicate, intimate and precisely focused. By avoiding really exploring the wider consequences of the creation of an army of Samanthas, Jonze is able to tell a deeply personal story about one man\u2019s struggle against loneliness. But it\u2019s still occasionally frustrating to get only tiny glimpses of another, broader, more technological but no less interesting, story happening outside the frame. Whether it would have been possible to set such a fragile love story in this wider context is unanswerable. What\u2019s clear is that Spike Jonze achieved exactly what he set out to, and the result is rather lovely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some spoilers \u2013 be warned. As previously noted, I thought this was a dreadful idea for a movie. Electric Dreams seemed facile and absurd in 1984, but computers being so much more commonplace in 2014, we know so much more about their strengths and limitations now which makes a movie like this very, very tricky […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[379,381,364,19,380],"class_list":["post-1444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","category-culture","tag-her","tag-joaquin-phoenix","tag-oscars-2014","tag-reviews","tag-spike-jonze"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-ni","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1444"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1448,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1444\/revisions\/1448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}