Spike Jonzeโ€™s digital affairโ€ฆ

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In the future, as depicted by Spike Jonze, no one will wear belts. This is a place of gently muted colour schemes, discreet facial hair and where poverty appears to have been eradicated โ€“ but, alas, for all its Utopian charms, the denizens of future Los Angeles are still susceptible to broken hearts. One such individual is divorcee Theodore Twombly, who finds therapy from his broken marriage working at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com โ€“ composing love letters for strangers to send to their spouses. Poor, lonely Theodore โ€“ that is, until he meets Samantha, and the two fall in love.

Samantha is a computer operating system, no less: Theodoreโ€™s IT girl, for want of a better pun. Jonze presents Theodore and Samanthaโ€™s relationship as perfectly natural โ€“ Her deploys all the tropes of the conventional rom-com โ€“ which forces a comparison between the directorโ€™s beautifully designed fantasy world and our own increasing dependency on technology. Can a man really fall in love with a computer โ€“ and do the emotions of an artificial intelligence qualify as real? โ€œAre these feelings real,โ€ Samantha wonders, โ€œor is it just programming?โ€ Jonze sends the filmโ€™s rom-com.com into tasty postmodern territory. In a calculatedly ambiguous way, Jonze appears to be both simultaneously mocking and embracing a genre (a tactic he used previously in Adaptation).

Into this comes Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore, mercifully dialling back his usual ham to deliver a more approachable and sympathetic performance. As Samantha appears to acquire consciousness (โ€œIโ€™m becoming much more than what they programmed,โ€), he begins to push her away, revealing what we can assume to be a general inability to love โ€“ presumably what put paid to his marriage. Voicing Samantha, Scarlett Johansson is husky, warm and involving โ€“ much as youโ€™d imagine. There is good support, too, from Parks And Recreationโ€™s Chris Pratt as Theodoreโ€™s work colleague, Rooney Mara as Theodoreโ€™s ex wife and, particularly, Amy Adams โ€“ playing Theodoreโ€™s best friend Amy as a kind of Diane Keaton character. There is a lovely shot towards the end of the film as Theodore and Amy sit on the roof terrace of their apartment block that recalls Keaton and Woody Allen in Manhattan nestled on a bench in the shadow of the 59th Street Bridge.

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Michael Bonner

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.