![]() ![]() Johansson has an easier time of it, having long taken over Demi Moore's mantle as the owner of Hollywood's huskiest tonsils. That's quite a burden of simplicity to put on a figure who must carry a two-hour film you can detect the strain during some of the date scenes, where Phoenix is required to gurgle with happiness one too many times – he wears the fixed grin of a man on a visit to the dentist. Even his consummation with Samantha is discretely blacked out, to spare us the lonely, masturbatory truth. A session of phone sex leaves him the bemused victim. An early mention of Theo's anger issues is never followed up on. ![]() Ditching the trail of dysfunction and hiding his scarred lip behind a neat little moustache, spectacles and high-hitched pants, Theo is a portrait of the sad sack as saintly urban eunuch – a great listener and perfect empath whose less attractive attributes are discretely masked from view. Phoenix is as sweet and soulful as we always suspected he might be. The script wants things both ways – an obvious outrage to Mara, Phoenix's love for his computer is seen as entirely normal by others – a penchant for blur that starts with the film's wispy compositions and seems to spread from there. It's like a zinger from one of Woody Allen's comedies that has somehow drifted into one of his alienation-and-anomie numbers. She gets in the zingiest line in the film, delivered over an exchange of divorce papers – "He couldn't deal with me, tried to put me on Prozac and now he's in love with his laptop" – but it doesn't quite land. She is played by Rooney Mara, thus confirming Mara's position as the ex most men would regret breaking up with, ideally through a happier times montage involving cascades of hair and white sheets seen in chalky sunlight. "Sometimes I think I've felt everything I'm gonna feel," confides Theo to Samantha, finding in her precisely the sympathetic ear he failed to find in his wife. The closer we draw to the central romance, the straighter grows the film's face. Theo's workplace is a website called, where he sits in office composing personal notes for those who can't be bothered – "Who knew you could rhyme so many words with 'Penelope'?" says a co-worker, admiringly of his work – while a neighbour, played by a curly haired Amy Adams, designs video games in which mums pick up "Mom points" for feeding the kids or beating the other mothers to the carpool, or else face the ignominious charge "You've Failed Your Children!" The whole thing looks like the most expensive ad for urban anomie ever made – Antonioni for the artisanal-cheese set – and for the first hour the conceit is unveiled beautifully, via a brisk series of gags, most of them in the periphery of the main plot. ![]() Rather, he's interested in alienation (like so many of his filmmaking peers this year), and the role that projection plays in constructing love, desire and identity itself.Needless to say, the film is half in love with the loneliness it diagnoses. Unlike " Ted" or " Minority Report," each of which has something in common with "Her," Jonze's film doesn't make the comedic conceit or technology the focus. That sensibility extends to his clever, even ingenious script, in which he builds an utterly convincing interior and exterior world for Theodore and Samantha to inhabit. Jonze has always possessed a meticulous, curatorially expressive visual sense, and here his talents are particularly sharp: He films Los Angeles in neutral tones of blue and gray, with pops of bright red (including Theodore's shirt) providing startling slashes of contrast. Jonze, after all, brought similar sensitivity to " Being John Malkovich," " Adaptation" and " Where the Wild Things Are." But "Her" is something special even for this gifted director's idiosyncratic oeuvre. ![]()
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