There’s a more appropriate three-letter title for the director Spike Jonze’s movie “Her”: “Duh,” dragged out into a teen-ager’s three- or four-syllable reproach, which translates to, “Don’t fall in love with your cell phone.” That’s what the movie’s protagonist, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), does, and—surprise—it doesn’t go so well. He’s a lonely man who, taking the advice of a commercial blaring on a corporate-lobby video screen, downloads “Operating System 1” onto his computer (which also controls his smartphone). O.S. 1 is a ramped-up version of Apple’s Siri that learns from its user and interacts with him or her in surprisingly intimate ways. Theodore chooses a female voice, and the voice he gets is that of Scarlett Johansson. The system gives itself the name Samantha, and Theodore falls in love with the simulation of a woman even as “she” (or, rather, it) professes her love for him.

From the movie’s very first scene, an extreme closeup of Theodore dictating a love letter on the occasion of a fiftieth anniversary that’s not his own (that’s his job, as a writer at a company that produces personal letters for hire), it’s obvious that Theodore, a cog in a cheerfully ruthless machine of technological simulacra for human connections, is coming in for a bruising. And he’s already bruised: he is going through a painful divorce from Catherine (Rooney Mara), with whom he had been together for decades; living alone, he freely admits to his friend and neighbor, Amy (Amy Adams), that he is addicted to video games and Internet porn (we see plenty of the former, only a hint of the latter). The overly plugged-in Theodore, himself a skillful and modest perpetrator of electronically enabled deceptions, is ready for his comeuppance.

“Her” is a cautionary tale that offers warning where none is needed, a diffuse and sentimental admonition to put the smartphone down, push away from the computer, turn off the TV, unplug the game controller, and connect with people. But when people do attempt to connect, Jonze (who also wrote the script) endows them with nothing but psychobabbulous clichés to define themselves. The film, with its dewy tone and gentle manners, plays like a feature-length kitten video, leaving viewers to coo at the cute humans who live like pets in a world-scale safe house.

At first, the movie seems to play out like a classic pen-pal story, similar to Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” a movie about two store clerks (James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) who clash with each other at work while falling in love with their literate and cultured (and pseudonymous) pen pals, who turn out to be each other. There, the romantic connection of sympathetic minds—in classic Lubitschean fashion—proves to be, when push comes to shove, a story about the erotic force of bodies. But Jonze does more than eliminate the promise of physical love from the equation; he unbalances it from the start.

The operating system isn’t just software; it’s also a product that Theodore has purchased. Jonze doesn’t show the transaction, doesn’t show Theodore shelling out or uploading his credit-card info or clicking “Accept,” and it matters—because the other cautionary aspect of “Her” would be: don’t fall in love with a prostitute whom one has hired, because his or her expressions of ardor may well be of doubtful sincerity. In depicting a consumer who is taken in by the insinuating sales talk of the software, Jonze has made a movie that, thematically, belongs in an award-season trilogy alongside “American Hustle” and “The Wolf of Wall Street”—but that, unlike those movies, elides the story’s mercantile aspects in favor of facile and scattershot moralizing.

In effect, Jonze tells a story of a slick cyber-scammer luring Theodore (and many others) into a Faustian bargain—a sentence of physical solitude in exchange for compassionate conversation and insight on demand (and even ahead of demand). The depressed and lonely Theodore exhibits an infantilized pathos: his interests don’t go beyond himself, and he craves precisely the on-call doting of a virtual servant. He’s getting the best relationship that money can buy, at a price that the upper middle class can afford. Yet Theodore, it turns out, had what might best be described as a preëxisting condition: in a brief scene with Catherine, she complains that he placed expectations on her behavior, even on her mood, that she was unable to meet. If he has turned his attentions to Samantha, it’s because she offers exactly the sort of unquestioned, infinitely responsive companionship that no human (certainly no unpaid human) ever could. Ultimately, the story’s conflict of technology with reality turns into one of expectations versus reality—of selfish desires conflicting with the needs of others. The movie converges to the trite eternal theme of a man who needs to grow up—a familiar moralistic trope that invests a movie with an air of seriousness.

Yet if Theodore has some growing up to do, he won’t get to do it by blaming his troubles on the big and ready target of technological seduction. Spoiler alert: it isn’t Samantha’s lack of a body that makes Theodore question his relationship with her, it’s jealousy—his discovery (presented, ludicrously, as a surprising revelation) that the operating system isn’t his alone but is shared by thousands of other users and is in love with six hundred and forty-one of them. The device’s confession reminds me of the catalogue aria from “Don Giovanni,” in which the seducer’s valet explains the Don’s irrepressible ways to one of the women he seduced and abandoned. (Here’s an inspired—and subtitled—performance.) This revelation makes Theodore see the operating system as, in effect, an electronic prostitute, a promiscuous mercenary, makes him feel as if he’s being played for a chump.

How would the operating system break up with its human lovers? Second spoiler: I’m a little obsessed with owning hard copies of music and movies, rather than trusting in the cloud or the stream, because the cloud can disperse and the stream can dry up when contracts expire or suppliers change hands. The underlying subject of the movie is “ ‘Her’ today, gone tomorrow”—the operating system is in the hands of the great corporate potentates who giveth and taketh away according to the vicissitudes of marketing, leaving its users to (pun intended) their own devices. Jonze’s lack of confidence in the market’s ability to maintain access to the objects of delight, his suspicion of the manipulation of desire through controlled inaccessibility, may be well founded, but it hardly takes two hours of inflated fantasy to suggest as much.

Jonze seems to fret, with a factitious op-ed gravity, that people aren’t spending enough time with people, aren’t sufficiently open to each other’s needs—and that the digital overlords are to blame. It’s the sort of facile humanism that makes regression so appealing. The people he creates are so synthetic, so artificially sweetened, so pure in their maudlin isolation, that it’s hard to know whether he’s satirizing the emptied-out specimens who are condemned to each other, damning the advanced technological powers that have emptied them out, expressing his angelic fantasies of defiled innocence, or merely bumping up against the limits of his imagination.

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