Him and Her

Leave it to visionary surrealist director Spike Jonze to give online dating a whole new meaning.

The filmmaker who went from steering full-throttle music videos for the Beastie Boys and R.E.M. to crafting intricately woven modern mindbenders like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation has made a sublimely odd piece of poetry about lost love that could be the most powerful film of the year.

Surging with Oscar buzz after Jonze was honored with a Best Screenplay award at the Golden Globes on the same night in mid-January when I first experienced the film, Her is a downbeat rumination of a love story. It’s a near-future romance, and a simple one, really, except for one small-but-crucial piece of data: The relationship is between a man and his computer.

Starring Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore, the picture is set in a shimmering Los Angeles of the future where each high-rise resident’s loneliness comes coated in candy-wrapper colors. Not unlike ours, Jonze’s world is one in which you can so quickly know intimate details of just about anything, yet true intimacy is perhaps at a farther distance than ever before.

Drowning in this idyllic isolation, Phoenix is a professional letter-writer who pens amorous notes from afar so paying strangers can connect with the people they love.

He is a Cupid by proxy, and though he excels at making others care for each other more deeply, it is killing him one X and O at a time.

Theodore is searching for a real connection, too, after the disintegration of his marriage. Ironically, he finds it in the form of Samantha, a hyper-real operating system that speaks to him in the breathy voice of Scarlett Johansson.

Beyond organizing Theodore’s hard drive, Samantha becomes the one thing he orients his life around. He leans on her insight and feedback, her comfort, enthusiasm and patience. They work together. Write songs together, and even sleep together.

Beautifully, heartbreakingly told, there’s a classic sense of tragedy in Jonze’s work and alarming allusions to our real-life culture where technology can make it more alluring to be something to everyone instead of everything to someone.

Quite the obsessive on the subject of flawed mortals attempting to connect with one another and failing tragically to do so, Shakespeare once described love as “an ever-fixed mark.”

In his famous Sonnet 116, he wrote, “It looks on tempests and is never shaken,” before concluding that if he were ever proven wrong about these thoughts, he would gladly recant all that he had written to date.

While rebutting a rash of false teachings in the coastal city of Corinth, the apostle Paul wrote to Greek believers there, “Love never fails.”

Much of modern culture plays up the thrills of an intimate relationship and all the things one must do and buy to attain and sustain that first spark of attraction, but many giants of historical philosophy agree that true love’s steadfast, unwavering nature is its greatest and defining asset.

Theodore understands this. When describing to Samantha the ache of loneliness, Phoenix’s character doesn’t tell of some adrenaline-inducing adventure he longs for or an insatiable physical attraction to his ex-wife.

No, he replies simply and quietly, “It’s nice to share your life with somebody.”