![]() Yet Theodore, it turns out, had what might best be described as a preëxisting condition: in a brief scene with Catherine, she complains that he placed expectations on her behavior, even on her mood, that she was unable to meet. He’s getting the best relationship that money can buy, at a price that the upper middle class can afford. The depressed and lonely Theodore exhibits an infantilized pathos: his interests don’t go beyond himself, and he craves precisely the on-call doting of a virtual servant. In effect, Jonze tells a story of a slick cyber-scammer luring Theodore (and many others) into a Faustian bargain-a sentence of physical solitude in exchange for compassionate conversation and insight on demand (and even ahead of demand). In depicting a consumer who is taken in by the insinuating sales talk of the software, Jonze has made a movie that, thematically, belongs in an award-season trilogy alongside “American Hustle” and “The Wolf of Wall Street”-but that, unlike those movies, elides the story’s mercantile aspects in favor of facile and scattershot moralizing. Jonze doesn’t show the transaction, doesn’t show Theodore shelling out or uploading his credit-card info or clicking “Accept,” and it matters-because the other cautionary aspect of “Her” would be: don’t fall in love with a prostitute whom one has hired, because his or her expressions of ardor may well be of doubtful sincerity. The operating system isn’t just software it’s also a product that Theodore has purchased. ![]() But Jonze does more than eliminate the promise of physical love from the equation he unbalances it from the start. ![]() There, the romantic connection of sympathetic minds-in classic Lubitschean fashion-proves to be, when push comes to shove, a story about the erotic force of bodies. The film, with its dewy tone and gentle manners, plays like a feature-length kitten video, leaving viewers to coo at the cute humans who live like pets in a world-scale safe house.Īt first, the movie seems to play out like a classic pen-pal story, similar to Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” a movie about two store clerks (James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) who clash with each other at work while falling in love with their literate and cultured (and pseudonymous) pen pals, who turn out to be each other. But when people do attempt to connect, Jonze (who also wrote the script) endows them with nothing but psychobabbulous clichés to define themselves. ![]() “Her” is a cautionary tale that offers warning where none is needed, a diffuse and sentimental admonition to put the smartphone down, push away from the computer, turn off the TV, unplug the game controller, and connect with people. The overly plugged-in Theodore, himself a skillful and modest perpetrator of electronically enabled deceptions, is ready for his comeuppance. And he’s already bruised: he is going through a painful divorce from Catherine (Rooney Mara), with whom he had been together for decades living alone, he freely admits to his friend and neighbor, Amy (Amy Adams), that he is addicted to video games and Internet porn (we see plenty of the former, only a hint of the latter). ![]() From the movie’s very first scene, an extreme closeup of Theodore dictating a love letter on the occasion of a fiftieth anniversary that’s not his own (that’s his job, as a writer at a company that produces personal letters for hire), it’s obvious that Theodore, a cog in a cheerfully ruthless machine of technological simulacra for human connections, is coming in for a bruising. ![]()
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