It is Samantha who is the plausible and sympathetic character, far more so than the weirdly contorted and contrived creation that is Theodore. He is a Frankensteinian sewing together of two tonal imperatives. Theodore has to be enough of an oddball for the exotic strangeness of the situation to work, but enough of a hunk to sell the love story. Yet the movie wouldn't work with conventional comic detachment. Their affair is actually most like a extended, evolved version of something that might have found its way into Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex …, although it also aspires to something comparable to Annie Hall. There are shades of something gentler, such as Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl, with Ryan Gosling as the guy who falls in love with a blow-up doll, or Hirokazu Koreeda's Air Doll, in which it is the doll who develops a soul and falls for the guy. Yet Scarlett Johansson clearly approached her role in nothing like the same spirit that Yul Brynner played the cowboy-robot in Westworld, in 1973. The film draws distantly on futuristic fantasies like Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, with a molecule of Michael Crichton. He's still friendly with his ex-girlfriend Amy (Amy Adams). Is there a market for such a niche luxury service in the near future? Evidently so, because Theodore lives in a spectacular apartment, and his material comfort does not appear to be affected by a nasty, ongoing divorce from Catherine (Rooney Mara). He has an entirely unironic job in a company called in a "creative" office space: Theodore composes special-occasion letters for the tongue-tied, the inarticulate and the illiterate, and his firm's state-of-the-art software will print out authentic-looking handwritten drafts of his dictation. Joaquin Phoenix presents an assemblage of quirky character traits as the egregiously named Theodore Twombly, a lonely guy with an unattractive moustache and glasses who wears the high-waisted slacks that have apparently become fashionable for men in this era. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. It is engagingly self-aware and excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve it's ingenious and yet remarkably contrived. Her is a really distinctive piece of work, which has drawn countless adoring notices and endless gags about Siri, the voice of Apple's iPhone. Everything tends to be lit with a dreamy, woozy kind of afternoon sunshine and lens flare, in a place where a contented, diverse population mills happily around, rather like a TV ad spot for Apple computers directed by Douglas Coupland. Spike Jonze's relationship comedy is set in a techno-perfect Los Angeles of the near future, a u-topia with the tiniest hint of dys.
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