Review: HER: Intimacy and Saturation

It's the near future and it's all glass and pastel. A very clean Joaquin Phoenix gazes out at us and tells what he loves about us and how he can't wait until he sees us again. He closes off with the word, "print", and we pull back to find him dictating romantic letters like everyone around him who croon the same kind of stuff into their wood panelled workstations. The print out comes out on the kind of coloured paper we used to use for intimate letters, the font looks like longhand with a randomiser. He tosses envelopes into a post box on his way out of the office. It's a nice place, this future.

Once home, Theodore (Phoenix) idles his evening with a holographic game and signs into an online sex date service that is instantly gratifying but also potentially too weird to be erotic. It doesn't help him sleep. It brings on more memories of his ex. He is dithering over signing the divorce papers. 1st world and 1%, sure, but he is in trouble.

The new hip operating system features learning technology fronted by a voice of choice. This is where the film reaches it's coup. The original voice was the highly capable Samantha Morton. Spike Jonze recast it with Scarlett Johanson. The buzz about this film makes a lot of this and how it means that Johanson won't be up for a film-long performance because she's there in voice only. But it also means that we have no trouble at all in visualising the Sodastream Girl and while we can comfortably predict from their first dialogue that these two will fall in love without the visualisation when we do have it the effect is instant. As soon as we hear and "see" her Samantha, the name the OS gives herself, is Johanson and she's in the cast.

The core narrative of this film is a familiar one. Recent outings like Lars and the Real Girl and Ruby Sparks play on love outside the norm have played out tensions between a central relationship and the community of the living/real/human/etc partner. Relationships with technologically created lovers are as old as Greek myth, through ETA Hoffmann and Twilight Zone and Star Trek. Ruby Sparks was about control and Lars about acceptance. What does Her put on the table?

While there is some initial awkwardness that prevents Theodore admitting that he's in love with an OS he eventually does and rides any resulting ridicule. We've already seen his alarm at online sex and then we follow him on a date that starts beautifully but turns very weird at the kiss goodnight moment. He craves intimacy, even maintains a career in celebration of it, but he sucks at it.

At first we think his ease with the developing romance between himself and Samantha the OS will lead him on to rejecting the ease of having a partner who trains herself to meet his needs but we are to be disappointed of that smugness. He is, rather, excited by the discovery offered him by a partner who learns faster than he can and is happy to accept a subordinate role. When the inevitable machine-that-feels moments come up this power relation sends him scurrying back to the comfort of the third dimension.

The third act is all about learning and a return to our initial expectations of the logical progression of the pairing and we are dealt a surprise so quietly delivered it feels like the memory of a hangover. I'm not going to spoil it here but it's good.

Performances are strong across the board in this talk-heavy film. Phoenix takes us on his shoulders as the emotional centre. Johanson's sprightly vocal gymnastics give a powerful indication of what it must sound like to discover, practice and perfect human emotions starting from zero. At one point she adopts a robot monotone as a joke which reminds us of the problem of creating a synthesised voice would be for real and then to the question of how much of what Theodore hears is illusion or should more properly be considered primary experience. With a less able pair of tonsils we might have been in trouble (though, as an admirer, I'd love to hear what Samantha Morton had made of it). The performance that never seems to get a mention is Amy Adams. Having subtled down her weird intensity from The Master to American Hustle she chooses here to channel Sandy Dennis and the nerdy brittleness that old stager brought to her Robert Altman roles, a kind of brittle nerdiness. Under sung but screen warming nevertheless.

However, as much as I can praise Her I have to say that the sheer repetition of issues and motifs starts feeling like saturation rather than completeness and that what at heart is a half hour Twilight Zone episode (there were several like it back in the 60s) has been stretched to at least half an hour over its proper length for the hell of it. Jonze is no stranger to handling esoterica with great flare and can put perfectly timed comedy into anything. Here he loosens the creative belt in the same way that Michel Gondry did in his first outing past Charlie Kaufmann (The Science of Sleep) and Kaufmann's first without either Gondry or Jonze (Synecdoche, New York) and the result is not so much creativity gone wild as a flabby lack of restraint. There are great moments here but they risk sinking out of sight as we wonder how long we've been sitting there looking at this.

Review: AMERICAN HUSTLE

Everyone who reviews this starts with the combover so I'll extend that and go to the line delivered very early in the piece: people believe what they want to believe. We already know that it's about a long con from the title. Some folk reviewing this have stopped there and, while bowing to the quality of the performances, have struggled with the pulse and declared it flatline shallow. I think otherwise. We are told about the power of perception wrapped in the con game so we know that minutes in. Did no one else think that that was just the start (the literal one as well as the thematic one)?

For me all the sexy P.T. Anderson/Scorsese movement and cutting and the hits 'n' memories jukebox score are props for the perception and trickery we have bought our tickets for. And those things themselves provide flooring for what is at stake throughout this entire film.

David O. Russell's career start came between Marty's twilight and Anderson's dawn. He has his own style which has done well enough by him so far and is pretty evident in the recent superb Sliver Linings Playbook and The Fighter, not too long ago. He doesn't need to cover Scorsese, he wants to and he wants us along for the ride. And we're happy to groove along to the slick sights and sounds. So much so that it just gets easier to miss sight of the pink elephant over there in the corner: ATTRACTION.

The reason for the combover and the hustle itself, for the horny pursuit by the Fed of his own glory, of Pete the gangster for Rosalyn, of Rosalyn for Irving, of Irving for Sydney and Sydney of her alter ego Edith. Low stakes or high in this undiagnosed rom com, everyone's getting hard for someone or something. And in one of the most interesting ways I've seen in a mainstream movie, this is centred around the women.

I don't mean only libidinally. The two female frontrunners here are such powerhouses that a few less notches of conviction in the performances or a miscasting would have rendered this film as shallow as its critics would have it. But the performances and casting are compelling.

For me this starts with Amy Adams' accent. We notice it slip from posh to American so slightly that it seems accidental and we start worrying that Adams has been miscast. This, by the way, is after we have already heard her half of the narration in American. Now that's a con. It is every bit as impressive an acting trope as Christian Bale's method paunch as it's chiefly there to unnerve us about Adams' character: is she self deluded about her ability to deceive or, more creepily, does she know that even a wobbly accent like her British one only ever need be wobbly when she turns on the seduction which she does with anyone who needs it. Throughout all of this, her intensity is every bit as daunting as it was in Anderson's The Master (where it could freeze its audience). Beside this, the comb-overture feels mechanical, a director's conceit rather than loot from the material.

Then there's the already well proven Jennifer Lawrence, fresh from explosive craziness in Silver Linings Playbook, landing deep in white trash central. She is chaos, violence, greed but not even slightly insane. Her narcissism constantly sparks against her restless alertness for something better can result in something as dizzyingly funny as the "science oven" scene or as edgy as the attraction at the casino bar. The nagging sense of disappointment lurking beneath and probably fuelling her volatility is never too far from the surface. When Roslyn and Sydney meet and recognise each other we hold our breath.

Otherwise there is the hair in Sydney's big rollers or Richie's infestation of bacteria-sized ones, Irving's ceremonial combover vs the alpha gangster's defiant wild near-baldness. Bale meeting De Niro on screen with both of them physically transformed is reminiscent of Martin Sheen meeting method emperor Brando in Apocalypse Now. And the refs and balances go on and the kingdom of clever reigns. But without those two women this is an empty caper movie with a little lesson about ambition tacked on.

The attraction that binds each character and every scene, in all these forms, is what makes American Hustle so satisfying a ticket. This extends to the best trailer of the year which has the line about belief and perception and then ditches the dialogue as a deft edit of Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times explodes from the speakers. The first track on the first album, this was how Led Zep announced itself to a world that would be in its thrall for a decade. The visual edit matches the song but doesn't have to. We get the idea. We also get the surprise: looks like a slick caper is really a romance.

Hey, I've done an entire review without anything substantial about the plot of a fiction film. You want plot? Cinema's over there.

Review: THE MASTER

First we see the subject. Not just the topic but the character about to be subjugated. Freddie Quell is all deconstructed animal, bleeding the alcohol from torpedoes  humping the prone sandwoman on the beach and then finishing himself off in the shallows, giving only sexual answers to a Rorschach test, fashioning booze in the cleaning closet of the department store where he works as a photographer and sharing it with the store model he's just picked up, provoking and then fighting with a customer before storming out and dragging the model with him like a coat he's just remembered. He could be a caveman with a club from a fifties Playboy cartoon, dragging a woman by the hair.

He is not alone in this. He's just been demobilised from the US Navy at the end of WWII and has, along with his fellow servicemen been lectured about the struggle they will face in getting back to civilian life after what they've been through. He's the same as them but perhaps pushed a little further in certain areas. He's not Everyman but Damagedman.

So when he flees the scene of a possible manslaughter he jumps dock on to a lavish looking yacht party and stows away. He's discovered and taken to the commander of the ship, the self possessed Lancaster Dodd who effortlessly takes control over Freddie, recognising him as the perfect guinea pig for his ideas on human existence and its cure, a body of supposition he calls The Cause.

Freddie is taken into the well-funded looking cult but I wouldn't say absorbed. He is subject to some experimental processing by Dodd which involves answering some penetrating questions, many repeated until the answer changes. The processing is a means of identifying vulnerability in the subject and is the only thing short of physical violence that has got through to Freddie and his violent narcissism. This scene shows a clear case of alter ego between the two men: one controlled and controlling and the other wildly rapacious. This, folks is not how you start a cult but how you perpetuate one; a market of human parasitic commensalism.

PT Anderson has played down the similarities between his Cause and Scientology and rightly so. His brief here has more to do with the motion of a fabricated alternate reality than a particular instance of it. Dodd does come across like an L Ron Hubbard but also like an a-religious David Koresh or Jim Jones.

A beautifully eerie scene plays this out as Dodd sings a bawdy Irish folk song to one of  his gatherings. We see Freddie gazing at it with pleasure and then in the next shot and for the duration of the number all the women in the room are naked. At first this seems like more of Freddie's galloping libido but soon enough it's clear that he is recognising how Dodd is experiencing the occasion; the adoration of available women and docile men. Roll on, ye Joneses, Koreshes and Mansons, here is the bounty of your pluck.

Also absent is any concreteness to the details of The Cause. Beside notions of humans being not of this earth there is little to attach this fabrication to those of Scientology. The scenes of physical and mental processing carry the same kind of hypnotic/entrancing/brainwashing manner as any indoctrination. The scene of Freddie's enforced pacing and continual redefinition of what he is touching is interminable and exhausting. The physically gentler intercuts of Peggy Dodd and her exercises in doublethink are chilling but seem all too brief.

The question of whether Freddies evil ways can be fully subjugated to the Master's plan is the question of whether Freddie and Dodd can fuse together. What at first might seem a good proposition for a bit of Jack Sprat compliments of the reason eventually develops to reveal conflicts. A telling moment when Dodd bursts into puerile fury at the persistent questioning of a journalist about the claims of The Cause strikes him off the roll call of the self-controlled. Dodd's violence is altogether more disturbing than Freddie's ready fists.

But there's a clear limit to how profoundly the master can penetrate Freddie's being when Freddie's self interest is so essential. The sequential question is then how much need has he or any of us for a master of any kind? What does that make any member of the cults that have existed and those countless that shall? Weak-willed? Maybe. But maybe, just maybe, a touch too civilised or socialised ... or processed.

I find an interesting comparison between this and Martha Marcy May Marlene rather than PT Anderson's other films. In Martha ... there is no need to inject obvious religion into a cult that clearly already has a charismatic leader. The offer of a kind of alternative life consolidation seems key to both the fantasy history of The Cause and the unnamed family of Martha ... and in both cases it can only mean subjection. The scary part is the apparent will towards subjection, the guilty victims that cults create.

I'm a critical fan of PT Anderson but I will say this of his work: I seldom feel the need to revisit it because it stays with me. It's very hard to forget Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love or There Will Be Blood. And though I find this one harder to connect with than any of the others I'm left haunted by it.

Anderson's visual strength remains intact. He is like Kubrick in the deliberateness of his images but not as winceable as Wes Anderson. His use of music has been improving steadily since he gave up on the jukebox approach. And his casting is again central to his films' integrity.

Hoffman brings his industrial strength presence to Lancaster Dodd. He is intimidatingly present in his scenes and his few sudden flashes of anger reveal a terrifying narcissism.

Phoenix takes a rather strange path in creating Freddie but it's worth it as it allows for both the vulnerability and visceral force elemental to his character. We know more about him than any of the others but he keeps a lot of himself in shade to the end.

Last and best, IMHO, Amy Adams. Peggy Dodd is the cold and deadly brains behind the man. Whether falcon-eyed in a crowd, servicing her husband with such matter of factness that it is both disturbing and arousing, or staring straight into Freddie's point of view and persuading him and us that her eyes are changing colour, or reciting pornography in a voice as cold as a catheter, her performance is like watching a cyclone without a soundtrack; her violence will always look like beauty but will also look like death.

I saw this at the Astor in its 70 mm presentation and was glad of it. The sound cut out about a third of the way through and we missed a little dialogue but quite pleasantly I don't think we missed a single point made in those few minutes, even though there was clearly dialogue being spoken. There's Hitch's requirement seen to and not even intentionally ;)