HER SPIKE JONZE BROLL MOVIE

HER SPIKE JONZE BROLL MOVIE

To me, they make the movie feel a little like Theodore’s forged love letters: printouts designed to look lovingly handmade. The film’s whimsical, gold-tinted visual style and musical accompaniment (wistful piano lines and bouncy Arcade Fire) might be seen as a cheery corrective to or an ironic extension of Her’s dour take on modern relationships. If previous Jonze heroes kept trying to enter into the world, only to find themselves stuck once more inside their own skulls, Theodore keeps retreating back into his head, then somehow winding up face to face with the very thing he was trying to escape: the need to commit, to let go, to open up. The film’s punch line is that even this factory-ordered relationship turns out to be a messy, complicated thing. On the other hand, for all her free-thinking independence, she remains a direct manifestation of Theodore’s need for a perfect partner, flawless in body and spirit on account of possessing neither. On the one hand, the movie goes to great lengths to make her more than a too-good-to be-true dream girl: much of its poignancy comes from the fact that, like Theodore, she both yearns for and fears physical contact. In contrast, Johansson’s Samantha seems perfect to a tee: sweet, intelligent, playful, organized. Like many Phoenix characters, he seems a little off balance, physically and mentally, as if he’s perpetually on the brink of an eruption of violent self-loathing. Credit also goes to Phoenix, playing a sensitive, puppy-doggish, caterpillar-mustached romantic whose day job consists of writing intimate letters on behalf of anonymous clients. His romance with the disembodied Samantha is as real as, if not realer than, any of the film’s human relationships: like all of Her’s dialogue, their conversations are just fluid and articulate enough to sound natural, and just clumsy enough to sound spontaneous. It’s important to note that Jonze never makes Theodore an object of pity or scorn. But Her turns out to be something closer to the bone: a scary, sobering parable about the psychological toll of loneliness. Its premise-a lonely, recently separated man named Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) slowly falls in love with his artificially intelligent computer operating system (voiced chattily, breathily, and in no way artificially by Scarlett Johansson)-invites all kinds of broad, zeitgeisty pronouncements about 21st-Century Man’s Relationship to Technology (which Jonze, admittedly, plays up). Her is the most universal and most topical of Jonze’s films so far. Malkovich’s tagline-“Ever wanted to be somebody else?”-could apply to any of Jonze’s protagonists: trapped in their own heads, and terrified of breaking out only to get trapped in someone else’s.

Jonze has gradually refined a wispy, child’s-eye style that’s been taken up by today’s American indie scene, but he also treats this perspective as a kind of straitjacket, something to be escaped from rather than indulged. He’s always been drawn to getting us so lost inside a character’s head that reality is experienced as a blurred, flared out, and mostly inaccessible dream-world. Over the course of four features, Spike Jonze has become American cinema’s poet laureate of solipsism.

Her spike jonze broll