A moving cyber-lullaby that won’t win the Best Picture Oscar, but it’s the nominee that best speaks to life in 2013 and ’14. It’s about two subjects that everyone in the civilized world today has a strong opinion about: love and technology. Machines with charming personalities are nothing new in movies. It’s a sci-fi staple. Never before though have we been so close to it coming true in real life. We have affordable machines now that talk to us in a human voice, carry on conversations and even crack jokes. It’s only a matter of time before these things become so well-programmed and so real that lonely people fall in love. It’s insane, but the insanity of love is the film’s explicit theme. People kill and die over love. Falling for a comforting voice that accepts us, strokes our ego and even challenges us a bit, in just the right ways, is nothing.
Writer/director Spike Jonze works a little miracle in that he makes a great movie about a non-cinematic premise. How do you make a lively film out of a solitary guy who mostly stares into computer screens and falls for a woman who doesn’t exist? Here, Jonze shows us how. He does it partly by writing full-blooded characters, from the leads to the supporting cast. Joaquin Phoenix in the lead role is a consummate sad sack. He’s not heroic, he’s not witty. Much of the audience won’t even like him, but we do buy him as a guy who’s in a romantic relationship with a machine, which is enough. Meanwhile, Amy Adams is frazzled and fetching as a woman who’s going through her own problems and Scarlett Johansson, in a voice-only performance, is ideal as the computer. Johansson sounds womanly enough to be smart and she sounds girlish enough to be cute, with a hint of rasp to sound human. It’s the kind of voice to which a man, and a movie audience, could develop an attachment.
It won’t win the big awards, but this is a prime candidate for a future cult Valentine’s Day favorite for lonely hearts.