#HER: A PYGMY REVIEW -- "Her" is my favorite film of 2013, a wistful and plaintive meditation on love, loss and loneliness that shares more than a little bit of the philosophical and emotional DNA of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," another magnificent film that wrestles with the euphoria of relationships, the agony when they implode, and the manner in which we go about collecting the pieces and trying to put them back together again.

I loved the film because it was not what I expected--the story of a withdrawn loser who finds human connections so uncomfortable that he turns, unnaturally, to solace with a machine--but rather a beautiful, deeply touching, penetrating story about a perfectly normal guy, reeling from a painful blow (he can fathom the emotional states of others, but finds his own inscrutable), who frees himself from his loneliness with a computer that, aside from lacking a body, is as human as you or I. (I originally wrote the previous sentence as "who frees himself from his loneliness with a computer who," so persuasive is the bianary).

I am dreading the upcoming "Transcendence," the story of a man who, once his consciousness is implanted into a computer, becomes godlike and begins smiting the puny humans infecting the planet. It's the well-worn, all-too-familiar Skynet scenario, in which machines achieve sentience and take over. Surprisingly the Skynet scenario features heavily in "Her," but chooses, blessedly, to take it in another direction.

I ended the film in tears. This is a sad love story, and the fact that it has hollowed out so many viewers speaks to its power to connect with us. The film forces us to confront the boundaries of love and even of sex. Can one be intimate without physicality? Certainly. Very few of us would ever contest that. And so, if we accept that in the future, machines may be so advanced as to be more human than human, why are we surprised that a love story between a man and such a machine has the power to move us so? Why should we be surprised that it so moved those in the film?

Thoughtful and illuminative, "Her" is a film with a deep and broad import, a foretelling, perhaps, of our future, and an incisive portrait of what it means to be human. We are, as Whitman said, walking contradictions; we contain multitudes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzV6mXIOVl4

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