Ambitious and salient, but too many questions

Rating: 7/10 (6 October 2014)

If you think this movie is about artificial intelligence (AI) like I did at the outset, you would (like myself) miss the point. You will be asked to suspend a lot of disbelief to get through this film. But that's okay.
As you progress through the film, the AI technology is supposed to kind of fade into background as you concentrate more on the relationship between Theodore (Phoenix) and a newly purchased digital assistant of sorts, powered by a sophisticated AI who calls herself Samantha (voiced by Johansson).
Set aside all your concerns about a consumer OS (operating system) that is so sophisticated that it is self-aware and seems capable of very deep emotions, including desire, ecstasy and resentment. She sighs, she laughs, she holds a grudge.
Is that all pre-programmed, or is Samantha just a fast learner of human experience and emotion? If you try to ask too many questions, as I discovered, you'll probably miss the forest for the trees. Spike Jonze, the director and writer, momentarily brushes against these questions in the dialog as it is natural human curiosity, but avoids getting bogged down in the details because it would only serve as a distraction from the core of the film.
And it is an interesting concept. The movie really is about how many of us experience relationships in the twenty-first century. The fact that Samantha is an AI is beside the fact.
People have already become accustomed to the idea of relationships entirely carried out over text messaging and social media. That the person on the other end of a conversation is AI or a human being is not relevant.
The layer of technology between two people creates an abstraction of that person, removed from the flesh and blood, body language, vocal inflection and cadence of a live person and leaving a curated version of ourselves.
With social media, because we can pause and formulate a reply, there is this kind of social staging area where we gather our best thoughts and ideas and once we have something we feel is satisfactory, we then hit the Send or Reply button and our words 'go live'. And because of this layer of abstraction, the nature of our relationships have been transformed.
In the end, these virtual relationships can't last because there is something fundamental to their nature that makes them ephemeral at best. The illusion of intimacy is revealed for what it is.
And the roller coaster of emotions, of characters vacillating between various phases and states of mind can often be bewildering, where questions of AI make way for puzzles about motivation.
And at the end of 'Her', we get an unsatisfying ending that ends up being opaque and vague. I presume Jonze wanted to avoid a pat closure. I suppose there could never be any other appropriate way to close off such a lofty concept. And 'Her' suffers from the 'half-baked' syndrome where it seems the studio pulled the trigger on the initial concept but duct-taped the conclusion after the fact.
Ambitious and stylish, this is a fresh take on the science-fiction genre that resembles our world projected just slightly forward. But you'll be scratching your head more often than you need to be able to pause and appreciate the story.