Those of you who know me are aware that I love the act of ranking more than any one particular type of thing that can be ranked. With that in mind, with a view toward emphasizing the rankings part of Ruby Rankings, this is the first ever RUBY RANKINGS MOVIE REVIEW!!! Best yet, I won't spoil crap (except spoiling whether the film was good or bad).
Film: Her (2013)
Dir: Spike Jonze (also writer, producer)
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Scarlett Johansson
Allow me to oversimplify things for a moment. A lot of movies are predictable without being inevitable. By that, I mean, you can see how the film is going to end, but the film hasn't really earned that ending. It's possible to make a perfectly good film this way, and a lot of films have to be like this. Disney films, for example. Why did things work out for Merida in Brave? The short answer is: because, duh, she's the hero. She's a strong independent good-role-model type, and the point of Disney/Pixar films is that these sorts of people win. I very much enjoyed Brave on a lot of levels. Feeling emotionally invested in the ending wasn't one of them.
Good movies, more often than bad movies, have endings that are, ok, predictable, more or less, but also inevitable. The writers, directors, and actors have really shown their work, making a film that works towards a very good payoff. That you can predict the Act 3 payoff at the close of Act 2 is no knock on these films, and a lot of masterpieces are in this category. The Usual Suspects is one of these, depending on how much you've heard about it. I raved about Gravity all winter. You knew how it was going to end, emotionally, even if you didn't know the details. It's emotionally fulfilling for a cycle of rebirth to come to the 360th degree. Even films like Hot Fuzz are like this; I'm not saying that you ever know the exact details of how something's going to end, but after the reveal makes things so absurd that the film sort of explodes out of the confines of its genre, you know the ending is going to be absurd to match.
Only a few films have endings that are perfectly inevitable but completely unpredictable. These are the ones where, after Act 2, you can't imagine in your wildest dreams how Act 3 is going to transpire, but after you've seen it, you can't imagine any other way it could've gone. You realize that something truly new happened. Many of my very favorite films are like this, such as All About Eve, Moonrise Kingdom, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
So, what does that have to do with Her? I'm getting there. But first, let's talk about the plot, yes?
Her is about Joaquin Phoenix's attempts to find true love. It's also about artificial intelligence, organic intelligence, free will vs. mechanism, physical vs. spiritual, and a lot of other philosophical-type metaphysical-type things. But at its core, the story's told from the perspective of a man who's trying to find love (and getting over a break-up, and having things get complicated, etc.). It's a fairly conventional narrative with a very creative, sophisticated philosophical overlay.
If the movie's not exactly explosively innovative, there are definitely individual scenes that qualify as such. In particular, the film contained what I think is the best scene with a completely black screen as I've seen in film. There's also some true hilarity, although less and less as the film goes on.
Do note that an enormous percentage of the screen time is focused directly on Joaquin Phoenix's mustachioed face. Like, a ridiculously huge percentage. There are long conversations during which Theodore and Samantha (the not-quite-disembodied voice of Scarlett Johansson) simply talk while the camera is fixed on Phoenix's face. I mean, listen. I find his face quite pleasant to look at. So, that worked for me.
Why should I, the hypothetical reader asks, go see Her?
You should go see Her because it's a very well-made story of love and loss with enough complexities to keep things interesting (not exciting; I don't think it's ever exciting, but you're not going to Her for excitement). You should see Her because the colors and sounds are beautiful, and the individual scenes are top-notch. Again, I'm not convinced the overall narrative is a triumph or anything, but the individual scenes are so well-crafted that this movie should easily win Best Original Screenplay. The score is glorious, as is to be expected when it's created mostly by Arcade Fire with some help from Karen O. Perhaps very intentionally, it really aims to be something of a sensory experience. The filming and camera work reinforce the subject matter quite well.
Any drawbacks?
It's a little long, at 126 minutes. That is to say, there are movies that come in at 126 minutes that I think could have benefited from being expanded. This was not in that category. There were two particular instances at which I thought the movie could've ended, and one at which I thought it actually was going to end (during the song "Photograph"). I'm not certain the narrative couldn't have stood on its own if it stopped there, but what happens at the end really is an emotionally mature conclusion. It might not be the one we want, but it's the one we should learn to accept.
So, back to the ridiculous idiosyncratic discussion of narrative theory...
Right, right. In short, Her is a very well-crafted example of the second kind of film. It was a top-notch effort, with an ending that was truly emotionally earned, but it didn't shatter any of my worldviews. Her is something that any reflective person should take in, reflect on, and not dismiss.
There were two films I saw this year that I hoped would be true masterpieces. Gravity was a true masterpiece. Her wasn't, and the point I'm trying to make is this: we should be all right with that.
RANKING SYSTEM!!!
Of course we need a ranking system. Basically, I've seen 412 full-length films in my life, and I've created a "Medal" system as follows:
Unranked: Bottom 50%
Bronze (B): Roughly one of the top 50% of films I've seen.
Double Bronze (BB): Top 40%.
Triple Bronze (BBB): Top 25%.
Silver (S): Top 15%
Double Silver (SS): Top 12%
Triple Silver (SSS): Top 7.5%
Gold (G): Top 5%
Double Gold (GG): Top 2.5%, roughly one of the 10 best films I've ever seen.
Triple Gold (GGG): Top 1%, roughly one of the 5 best films I've ever seen.
FINAL VERDICT ON HER:
Her was very good but not great. It was one of the very best films I've seen in the last 3 or 4 years, and a worthy Oscar nominee, pretty firmly in the "must-see" category. It wasn't a game-changer for me, though, and I'm not sure how it could have been.
Borderline BBB/S.
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