“Her” impacted me on so many levels. And the tremors continued well after the day after I saw it.
From the aesthetic point of view, I found the color palette, the shots of the city at night, the way the people were dressed, very attractive and engaging. The acting was uniformly excellent, making it that much easier to step into this near future world.
A world close enough to ours to make me think of Christmas Eve and Christmas flowing together. The anticipation… and then the day is here! Yes, here it is – the near future, where people don’t like to write letters themselves, but they like the idea of writing letters. And there’s this company where good writers with their amazing electronic digital machines will write beautiful letters for you in your handwriting, and send them to the people you love.
One of those writers, Theodore Twombly played by Joaquin Phoenix, is gifted in blending hi tech with sentiment. Customers require something special to celebrate special occasions and Theodore has a rich store of emotional sensitivity and literary expressiveness to draw from. When we see the interior of his hi-rise apartment in Los Angeles, there is no question that he is well-paid for his efforts. But his personal life is on the rocks.
Devastated by his wife’s decision to leave him, he is ripe for consolation and diversion and opts to sign on to an OS (Operating System) that is the latest thing in human-computer interaction. In a very short time, he is hooked by the caring emotional intelligence manifested by “Samantha” his own OS. She soon lets him know that she is self-aware and considers herself a “consciousness.”
The stage has been set for the viewer to consider how consciousness, corporeality, mortality, and intimate relations may be effected by the presence of increasingly complex and emotionally sensitive digital devices. If those issues are of interest to you, see this movie.