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When I first heard about this film and saw the trailer, I was attracted to it because of two main things - the presence of Joaquin Phoenix and the fact that it was a story about an artificial intelligence.  When I finally sat down the other day and watched the film, I discovered that it was so much more.  Though I’ve been lukewarm about Spike Jonze’s previous movies (except for Where the Wild Things Are - loved that one to death), I must say that he’s refined his strange storytelling style to a point of near perfection with Her.

The story of Her is fairly straightforward.  A man named Theodore is suffering from a not-so-recent break-up.  He stays away from dating and socializing in general, preferring to sit about doing his job and playing video games.  He heads out to buy a new operating system for his computer.  That OS also happens to be an artificially intelligence system, whereby it learns via interacting with its owner and gathering information from the Internet.  As the AI gains in intellect, it becomes more and more human-like.  Eventually, Theodore and the AI begin a relationship and fall in love.  But as the AI grows and learns more, it becomes apparent that relationship issues thought to only exist within the mortal realm transcend those barriers.

What lies within and beneath the story of Her is not straightforward whatsoever.  This movie takes an honest look at relationships and human emotion on so many levels that it’s truly astounding.  From the interaction of man and women to the way people perceive themselves for being “deviant” to the complexities of sex and dating both within the real world and the virtual world to the nature of love itself, there is so much going on in this film.

The mark of true directorial and storytelling mastery, the message that one takes away from Her will be unlike what other people get from it.  Looking over various reviews, I’ve seen people that agree with me, people that picked out something completely different and others that saw the complete opposite of what I saw.  But, the amazing thing is, everybody still liked it.  Part of what makes the movie so wonderful is that it doesn’t have any sort of preached message embedded within it.  It simply sits back, observes and lets the viewer decide for themselves.  Whereas many saw Her as a movie warning us about the dangers of the virtual world where it comes to social isolation, I personally saw it as an affirmation of the way people can be completely real and human despite not being physically present with one another.

Spike Jones has truly outdone himself with this one.  I would venture to say it’s in my top 20 movies of all-time, though I’d have to take a few weeks to review every movie I’ve ever seen to confirm or deny that.  It’s definitely one of, if not the, favorite movie I watched that was produced in 2013.  And the complexities of the story are made even more amazing by the excellent (potentially award-winning) performance of Phoenix.  He manages to create a character incredibly believable and then acts his way through half of the movie without anyone else being in the room with him.  From joy to tragedy, Phoenix is all over the place and does it with a level of skill that makes him one of the best actors working today.

Rotten Tomatoes (that notoriously finicky website) rates it at 93/87%, which basically means that everyone liked it, just some more than others.  Me, I’d rate it a bit higher.  And I would definitely recommend Her to anyone that enjoys Jonze, Phoenix or insightful stories about love.

Photo Credits -           

Her courtesy of awardsdaily.com