Vikram Johri: Love and tech

In the carefully tiptoed-around world of the Oscars, one of the biggest non-upsets of this year was the nomination of Her for the best picture category. With most other nominees, apart from Nebraska, not from the independent stable, it was good to see two small movies make the cut. Naturally, neither independent movie won.

Theodore Twombly writes letters for a living. They are addressed from mothers to sons, husbands to wives, friends to friends. He works in a post-technology scenario where everything is done by the computer - Twombly has merely to give commands verbally and the computer fashions his words into the most desirable fonts. He is the best in the business; he culls relevant bits from his knowledge of his clients' lives. (No, he is not the smug privacy intruder this sentence makes him sound; he is more in the image of Tom Hanks from Forrest Gump.)

Some of the tech ideas in Her are familiar to us, even though the movie goes one step ahead and is clearly set in the future. For example, when Twombly says "delete", the notepad shuts down. (Google, are you listening?) Be that as it may, Her's themes - love and its injuries - are universal, even daintily old-fashioned. Twombly's job, for starters, ticks the box. He has been writing letters for people since they were married, or were 12, or had their first affair, and so writes intimately and beautifully.

Thus, we find Twombly falling in love with Samantha, his OS (short for "operating system"), a smart, sometimes-sassy-sometimes-sweet "woman" who, like any program, is getting better at being human with every passing day. Director Spike Jonze keeps the palette refreshingly shorn of questions about status (how can a man love an OS, for instance) and focuses instead on the ravages of love, whatever hue it may take.

Twombly, recovering from a failed marriage, grows steadily fond of Samantha, who reciprocates his affections without the self-consciousness of non-human-ness. She is Scarlett Johansson's voice, so that may have something to do with her immediacy. However, it would be unfair to take away from the story's raw power. The "couple" go through the usual phases - romance, doubt, "betrayal", separation - yet what we have is a story that stays resolute to its original premise.

The movie niftily plays out elements of a classic love story as well as anxieties about post-technology relationships. Samantha and her OS cohorts bring an old professor "back to life" and, in one scene, she introduces him to Twombly. So we have this one-human-two-OS conversation going where Twombly - unbelievably but understandably - begins to feel overlooked. "Do you mind if I communicate with Alan post-verbally?" Samantha asks him at one point. Wow! As an audience, you do not even know on what scale - tragic, bathetic? - to measure your reaction.

Halfway through the movie, as we feel the tension of a man loving a non-human gradually build, there comes only the slight detour where Twombly is shown expressing doubts about the "relationship". But it is Samantha who ultimately leaves him, deciding to "find" herself as she treads the fine line between code and consciousness.

"It's like I am reading a book and it's a book that I deeply love," she tells Twombly. "But I'm reading it slowly now. So the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite. I can still feel you and the words of our story. But it is in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now. It is a place that's not of the physical world; it is where everything else is that I did not even know existed... As much as I want to, I can't live in your book anymore."

Joaquin Phoenix is in top form, playing a man whose love for a machine is more real than what lesser actors can profess for humans. Amy Adams as his friend, also battling a divorce and finding love in a machine, makes an impact in spite of a small role. And, of course, there is Johansson, with her slippery voice that will make you believe anything. Is she human? Will she become human? Can she be human, considering she does not have a body? Her provokes questions that, thank God, it does not purport to answer; it only allows the storyline to be leavened with them. For the longest time, I thought the movie works only because we know the person behind the voice - but no, that's not true. The movie works because it is a great story.

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