The future in which the Spike Jonze directed movie is set is suggested rather than primary visual architecture. It’s familiar but slightly dislocating, men wear High-Waisted pants, such as you might see in the Civil War, the technology is just a little smaller and swifter, and the city in which the film takes place drifts back and forth between a smoggy LA and a smoggy Shanghai.
Saturated in lyrical oranges and ambers, a dreamy, narcotic ambience presides, as if one of remembrance rather than projection, if that makes any sense. Even in the heavy, coarse fabrics of the clothes people wear, or in the forest imagery existing as backdrop in an elevator, you can feel a yearning for something authentic amidst the increasingly spacious and abstract world of technology.
Joaquin Phoenix, sporting the melancholy moustache of another, somehow European era, falls in love with an operating system played by the voice of Scarlett Johansson. He’s probably in every scene in the movie and he’s simply terrific. Gentle, nuanced and empathetic, his performance is the very opposite of the kind of grand scale acting we’ve come to expect from the likes of Christian Bale, and this dose of humble realism is immensely appealing.
The entire movie was appealing, actually, and it felt like relaxing into the lives of friends who were easy to be around. It was intimate but not needy, and it evoked our shared feelings of falling in love, of tumbling into one another and living in those times when everything is golden and funny and precious and even the colour of your partner’s sweater spoke to a greater truth. This was accomplished deftly, in small, perfect ways, and in spite of it being an abstracted, artificial relationship, it was still the most familiar and convincing depiction of love that I’d seen in years, including, of course, the awkward, tender and melancholic drift apart.
Sweet, charming and a little bit sad, it was a fun film to be a part of and it stayed with us, remaining a companionable presence, like an absent friend, as we shared drinks across the street—each one of our minds drifting off to a different point in time, and then happily returning to our present company.
]]>Well, it turned out to be one of those movies in which you are quickly conscious of the fact that it’s long, by which I mean you’re swiftly bored. It was impossible to penetrate through the surface of the images splashing in front of us, and instead of being immersed in the complexities of a grand narrative, we felt kind of like we were flipping through the pages of a pretty magazine while waiting for something better or more important to take place.
This might have been intentional, as it’s a relatively accurate thematic representation of the core of the source material, but it made for a pretty lousy movie. I mean, if we’d been handed a catalogue and told to go sit in the dark with earphones on– where passages of the novel were read to us–we probably would have had a deeper, more connective and personal experience.
There are a number of reasons for this failure, I think, one being that is was shot in 3D, and I’m not a big fan of this developing novelty. To me it’s a special effect that’s at it’s most useful when animating the unreal or exaggerating cataclysmic disasters. Instead of rendering actors more real and life-like, it reduces and flattens them into one dimension, draining all life and subtext from them. They’re about as emotionally penetrable as robots or mannequins, and as they stand in front of you there’s absolutely nothing compelling in them.
I had no interest or attraction to anybody in the movie. Hell, I didn’t even want to go to any of the lavish parties that were being thrown. Everything was just a summoned mirage to me, perhaps like the one that drove Gatsby toward his green light, and maybe that’s the difference between experiencing a work of art as a boy, and then returning to it later, in middle age, discovering that the fields you played in as a child were not tall stretches of eternity, but just small, scrubby accidents of geography.
