Takes a seemingly absurd premise and makes it plausible and emotionally true.

Rating: 7/10 (23 January 2014)

If you judge a movie on the criteria of degree-of-difficulty, you'd have to give writer/director Spike Jonze high marks for Her, a film that takes a seemingly absurd premise and makes it plausible and emotionally true.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a writer living in L.A. sometime in the near future. He works for a company that ghost writes "handwritten" letters for average people. Theodore can beautifully and simply express deep feelings on behalf of total strangers. Ironically though, he can't deal with real emotions in his own life, a factor that has lead to his pending divorce from fellow writer, Catherine (Rooney Mara). In the midst of loneliness and depression, Theodore buys a new artificially intelligent operating system to run his home computer and smart phone. The OS is like Siri on steroids (or, perhaps ginko biloba?). Each consumer of this new product gets a system that's custom fit to suit his or her every need. Theodore gets Samantha (voiced wonderfully by Scarlett Johannson). Samantha instantly starts organizing Theodore's life and seems able to anticipate his every need. She's the perfect support system: a partner, a friend and a cheerleader. She's the first voice he hears when he wakes in the morning and the last one he speaks to when he goes to sleep at night. And Samantha is also her own "person" -- her programming allows her to grow and develop her own interests and talents. So, it seems almost natural that Theodore falls in love with her. Only catch: she doesn't have a body.
Jonze (real name: Adam Spiegel) uses Theodore and Samantha's relationship to thoughtfully examine the themes of love, isolation and the increasingly integrated role technology plays in our lives. We shop online. We date online. Websites quickly learn our likes, dislikes and interests. Facebook's algorithm presents stories it thinks we'll want to read. Each user's experience is tailored them. So, how far-fetched is it to imagine that in the future, people will carry-on socially acceptable love affairs with artificially intelligent programs? Does romance need to have a physical component? Will a relationship with a computer actually be more satisfying than a relationship with a real person? Is that already the case? (How often do you enter a room and see people paying more attention to their smart phones than to each other?) Samantha is literally made for Theodore. Their match is a perfect one because she's a reflection of him and his needs.
The near-future landscape that Jonze paints is not very different from our current one (for once, a pre-apocalyptic future!). He imagines a Los Angeles that, a few years from now, looks more like Shanghai, an effect he achieved by... filming parts of the movie in Shanghai. But it's still a world that seems familiar and tangible, where a story like this seems sagacious rather than ridiculous.
Her, for all its cleverness and insightfulness, has a couple of flaws that keep it from soaring to true greatness. The first is that as surprisingly believable as Theodore and Samantha's relationship is, we aren't rooting for them. We can't shake the sense that it's just plain wrong. Plausible? Yes. Adorable? No. It's hard to invest yourself in a love story about two people (or, in this case, sentient beings) that you don't want to see together. The oddball premise also would've benefited from a leading man who's less idiosyncratic than Phoenix. I think a more likable, comedic actor – a Ben Stiller-type – could have made Theodore more relatable and extracted more humor from some of the scenes. But Mr. Jonze gets a lot of credit for attempting such a unique and bold premise – and almost pulling it off.