Many thanks to my
friend and fellow cinephile-in-arms Carson Lund for helping
me edit this piece.
Her is so obsessed
with trying to tell a story about “how we live now” that any of its profound ideas
seem quite self-evident. By playing the romance between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix, introverted to the point of limitation[i])
and his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson[ii]),
as a serious relationship, Jonze certainly asks us to explore radical territory
by thinking about our new(-ish) relationship to technology. However, it becomes
quite apparent that despite this bold premise, it’s more of a sleek surface to
create an allegory of loneliness. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a
choice, except Jonze emphasizes his narrative through utter banality, a
conventional romance about letting go of the past. Despite the uniqueness of
the central relationship, Jonze is complacent in simply following through the
various conventions of meet cute scenes, vulnerable people talking about their
vulnerability, and various day trips that play to broad gestures of emotions. These
sequences rely on montages that could come out of his 90s music videos—pleasantly
shot in mutedly light colors for pleasant compositions, but rarely perceptive
ones—pandering to a little more than a cinematic equivalent of BuzzFeed. It’s an
emotional simulacrum without depth.
