Lack of physical presence notwithstanding, Samantha at first seems close to the male fantasy of the perfect woman: motherly and nurturing, always capable of giving her undivided attention, and (best of all) requiring nothing in return. A generation on from the fugitive android lovers of “Blade Runner,” no one in “Her” has anything to hide. Whereas the very notion of a man falling in love with a machine would have once seemed the stuff of high fantasy or farce, in “Her” it feels like just the slightest exaggeration of how we live now, in a blur of the real and virtual - “dating” online, texting instead of talking, changing our “status” with the click of a mouse. But then, Samantha is no ordinary OS: It has a voice ( Scarlett Johansson, who replaced Samantha Morton during post-production), an attitude, and a curiosity that seems, well, almost human. operating system (“It’s not just an OS - it’s a consciousness”), Samantha (aka OS1) enters Theodore’s life rather by chance, and over time, like so much technology, makes him wonder how he ever lived without it. Laid low by a recent separation from his wife (Rooney Mara, seen mostly in staccato flashbacks), the divorce papers all but final, Theodore drifts about in a depressive haze, more adept at channeling strangers’ feelings than his own. (The actual “handwriting” is generated by computer, a lovely metaphor for our lingering analog affections in the digital era). This is how we first find Theodore Twombly ( Joaquin Phoenix), a former alt-weekly writer who now plies his trade as a latter-day Cyrano de Bergerac, penning other people’s love letters as a worker bee for the online service.
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