JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Movie #11: Frances Ha. Love it! Funny, moving, we have to see it again. Movie #12: Twelve Years A Slave. We’re disturbed that the ugliness that is slavery is presented with such formal beauty.

Spike Jonze’s Her may be the most romantic movie ever made because it dispenses with the trappings of movie romance: the attractive man, the adorable woman, their gregarious friends, long walks and beautiful sunsets, the trauma that nearly rips them apart, the joyous reunion. Those are just the extras, the ambience. Her serves up the real thing: the union of minds irrespective of time, space, and even corporeal existence.

This is what love is. The tragedy is that one of them doesn’t have a body, and the irony is that she’s played by Scarlett Johansson. (It’s kind of like Steve Martin’s The Man With Two Brains, played beyond the laughs.)

Joaquin Phoenix is handsome when he cares to be, but as Theodore Twombly he is the classic socially-inept nerd, in those high-waisted pants that the brilliant production designer has inflicted on the male cast members. Theodore is a sensitive soul who writes beautiful personal letters for other people: he’s seeking emotional connection in a world where everyone is connected but no one really cares. Much like our world with its illusion of connection, promoted by social media and the internet. And then Theodore gets a new computer operating system—an artificial intelligence that evolves at an exponential rate. Her name is Samantha, and it says something about our times that when Theodore and Samantha fall in love, it’s not that surprising.

Deceptively simple and genuinely odd, Her gets to the truth of love: that the beloved is the person you want to be in your head at all times (Being an OS gives her a distinct advantage), that complete honesty is not always helpful, that people have obligations to themselves that cannot be set aside for relationships.

We’ve always admired the work of Spike Jonze, but wondered if he would manage without his usual collaborator, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation). Where the Wild Things Are didn’t work for us—writer Dave Eggers provided whimsy instead of the authentic eccentricity that is the mark of Jonze’s films. As the writer and director of Her, and creator of its unique universe, Spike Jonze reveals emotional depths his previous works had only hinted at. His medium is Phoenix, one of the most amazing actors in the history of cinema. This can’t be the same actor who played Freddie Quell in The Master—that guy was more wild animal than human. Apparently Joaquin Phoenix can do anything, and as Theodore Twombly he breaks your heart by being thoroughly human. Will someone please look after Joaquin Phoenix, because if anything were to happen to him we could not take it.

P.S. Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com has just given us a business idea.