"Her" (2013)

In a neat bit of irony, the most human film of 2013 turned out to be a film about how human dependence on (or rather co-dependence with) technology is stripping away our humanity. Her is founded on a number of subtle contradictions. It's a warm, gentle film with a black hearted center. While a sincere film, it ultimately is cynical towards how it feels about humanity's ever increasing reliance on technology, and the simultaneous increasing advancement of that technology's capability. In the not too distant future, after his long time wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) asks for a divorce, the frumpy and awkward Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is increasingly sullen and despondent. Theodore has shut himself out from the world ... that is until he meets Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johannson, in a stunning, easy to overlook, performance), his latest operating system for his computer. Samantha is made up of highly advanced computer software, artificial intelligence so advanced it's almost human. While Theodore is uninspired by and disconnected from the world around him, he starts turning more and more to Samantha, who evolves an ever complex personality and emotional life. Theodore falls in love with Samantha, and she with him, and a relationship founded upon the messiness and implausibility of such a pairing is where most of the film's story takes place. But writer-director Spike Jonze never plays this as one big punch-line. In fact, he takes Theodore and Samantha's relationship seriously, never passing judgment or suggesting Theodore is a hopeless weirdo. One of the a great points Jonze makes is how Theodore's emotional health is on par with pretty much everyone else in the world. Theodore merely lives in a world where everyone is plugged into the cloud (We see Theodore walking the streets on more than one occasion and passing almost every single person caught up in some piece of technology). One of the film's finest feats is how it slowly turns Samantha into someone so life-like and real that we forget she's not a real person. Johannson's performance is nothing short of amazing. There are subtle changes in her voice which convey changes in emotions and states of minds, and make Samantha as real, if not more real, than anyone else in Theodore's life. In a Social Media Age, Jonze's point seems to be how though technology has made us more connected than ever, it's also done it in ways that even more widely disconnect us. While your Siri on your iPhone might not be sentient, the way you treat it often gives it meaning it would not otherwise have and, in turn, shapes you in ways you could not have possibly anticipated. Jonze's brilliance is taking this understanding and putting it underneath a committed artifice of strange, detailed quirkiness. Her is funny, often with an unnerving edge, but all that oddball humor always feels like it's in service of staggering depths of emotion and thematic resonance.

Grade: ★★★★