Best Films of the 2010s: Her

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Her

    

The thing I forgot about Her is that it’s really funny. It was perhaps the first arthouse movie I saw at the cinema, when I was 13, and I remember being left in something like emotional shock for the rest of the day. But as well as being a dazzling enquiry into the nature of love and consciousness, (and so much more than ‘the one where the man falls for his computer’) it is a quirky portrait of 21^st century masculinity. Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore Twombley (‘Big Guy Four by Four’ to women online) is only half-joking when he says he struggles to prioritise between videogames and online porn. He makes his living working for a (digital) company called ‘Handwritten Greeting Cards’, essentially using his eloquence to articulate other people’s feelings about other people. Vicarious living is the cornerstone of this world.

    What makes this film great is that we are primed, like Theodore’s ex-wife to mock when he falls in love with his operating system Samantha. Surely this is a sign of his inability to connect with a real woman? There are some swipes about modern living, but this film is far better than to make the usual anti-Instagram jokes that movies made by old people seem to think are endlessly clever. His love for Samantha is real, or at least Scarlett Johansson’s tender, playful, inquisitive voicework makes us feel Theodore’s perspective makes a certain sense. The ups and downs of their relationship before the devastating final act feel true, and Joaquin Phoenix delivers his greatest performance: more nuanced and convincingly suggestive of damage than his Joker.

     But the humour of the world building! The Super Mom video game where if you’re not perfect the virtual kids scream and writhe, the other mums judge you and you lose ‘mom points’. Another game where the player is guided by a  blob-like creature that I can only describe as the demonic id of a modern man-child who swears, giggles and makes remarks like ‘I hate women, all they do is cry all the time’. Director Spike Jonze creates a world as fascinating, damaged and offbeat as the characters that inhabit it, lit up by his trademark satirical flourishes.

Next Time: less cyber space, more outer space.