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| Universal Pictures |
Despite being one of the year’s most eagerly
anticipated awards contenders, Danny’s Boyle’s Steve Jobs has long faced controversy in both the representation of
its subjects and its troubled production history, which saw changes in
directors, cast members, and studios over the past year. Despite Universal
Studios managing to finally settle on an impressive cadre of talent both in
front of and behind the camera, there’s an unavoidable lack of necessity to the
film in lieu of how recently the film’s central subject passed away. While the
necessity of a film isn’t something I tend to get hung up on, this inability to
create historical context or look at Steve Jobs with any sort of objectivity in
regards to both his personal life and legacy, casts a shadow over the entire
proceeding.
Steve
Jobs
takes a look at the businessman and innovator in the behind the scenes minutes
leading up to his three keynote speeches in 1984, 1988, and 1998 where he
unveiled the Macintosh, NeXT box, and the iMac respectively. Instead of
focusing on the technology Jobs helped develop, the film takes a look at his
personal relationships with his ex-wife, daughter, and co-workers as these
individuals reappear in his life over the years to impart bits of wisdom and
give us glimpses of Jobs’ character, or at least the filmmakers’ idea of Jobs’
character. These figures from Jobs’ past and present, and the allusions to his
future creations, make Steve Jobs
feel somewhat like Dickens’ A Christmas
Carol. But a novel has space to linger and corners to peer into, and Steve Jobs is far too disjointed,
intentionally so, to feel like a sprawling moral epic. Ultimately this
structure and revolving door of character interactions feel closer to a stage play
than a film. Throw in a Greek chorus and we’d have Steve Jobs by way of
antiquity.
While Boyle’s expert eye for lighting can be seen
throughout the film, Steve Jobs is
far more the product of its screenwriter and is effectively an Aaron Sorkin
film. Sorkin writes for actors, and without a strong personality-type like
David Fincher, the direction simply becomes a bottle to contain all of Sorkin’s
wordy dialogue. This dialogue sounds great when delivered by actors of the
caliber of Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, and
Katherine Waterson, but none of it sounds like words that real, living, breathing
human beings would speak. Sorkin told The
Guardian that most of the dialogue is fictional and its apparent. Sorkin’s
dialogue is often the subject of parody, and in Steve Jobs he does nothing to sway the perception. Conversations,
like one between Jeff Daniels’ Apple CEO John Sculley, and Fassbender’s Jobs
about adoption and control are spread out over the course of the fifteen years
in the film. These moments are written for impact, not because they resemble
reality. There’s a Shakespearean quality to some of these scenes, an exhausting
amount of back and forth dialogue and double meanings before they almost always
climax with two people in a room, yelling at each other. It’s all made
wonderfully appealing by the performances, but the dialogue completely lacks
subtlety, and practically begs us to see the unmissable metaphor that Jobs is
more machine than man.
Sorkin’s work on 2010’s The Social Network manages to give Mark Zuckerberg a sense of
humanity that audiences can latch on to. In Steve
Jobs, Sorkin isn’t interested in Jobs the man so much as Steve Jobs the
vengeful god. Jobs is mythologized into this remorseless being who’s always a
step ahead of everyone else, with even his failings part of some larger plan
for him. The Spielbergian scenes between Jobs and his daughter, meant to
humanize him, never do their part and feel trite when surrounded by scenes that
are disinterested in the saccharine, scenes that ask the audiences to laugh and
enjoy Jobs’ ego, and ability to trample feelings without a pause. The film’s
ending scenes, which try to show us Jobs in a more positive light as someone
loving but “poorly made” is stretched out to the point of awkwardness. There
hasn’t been a prestige picture so unaware of how to end things since Spielberg
overstayed his welcome in the final moments of Lincoln.
The fact that Jobs is depicted as an asshole through
and through isn’t as much as an issue is the film’s inability to convey what
Jobs did to make him worthy of a film. Of course we have journalism profiles,
and countless books and documentaries about the real-life man, but the film
barely scratches at Jobs’ impact on Apple, his innovations, or expertise. It
instead gives the sense that he simply used other people’s work and got ahead
by being smartly cruel. While some of this may be factual, there’s a lot more to
the man than what the film wants us to believe. Instead of asking why Steve
Jobs was and is so important, the filmmakers simply place him on a pedestal and
ask us to praise him simply because he’s there.
What fully deserves praise is Fassbender’s performance
as Jobs. Regardless of whether he captures the essence of the real-life figure,
he delivers a thoroughly engaging performance that commands the screen. Of
course this isn’t anything we don’t expect from Fassbender, but considering how
little interest the film takes in Jobs’ humanity, Fassbender deserves even
further commendation. It’s not his mannerisms, his posture, or vocalizations
that make his performance as Jobs one of the year’s best, but his eyes and
their ability to go dull and lifeless and then become electrified all within in
moments. The screenplay may not give us Steve Jobs the visionary, but
Fassbender carries that torch in his eyes, and provides one of the sole aspects
of the film that makes Steve Jobs seem
like an almost necessary endeavor. The rest of the performances are also
unsurprisingly solid, though all get eaten up by the monologues and witty
dialogue devoted to Jobs, with the exception of Jeff Daniels, who is well
within his right to a Best Supporting Actor Nomination. Steve Jobs may fail to celebrate, or even meaningfully criticize,
the man behind the movie, but it is undoubtedly a celebration of acting, and
that alone is worth the price of admission.
As a biopic, Steve
Jobs is neither distant nor close enough to its subject to work, and
instead stays in the realm of inaccessibility. I have doubts that either Boyle
or Sorkin understood Jobs well enough to make this movie into what many thought
it should be or needed to be, and so they do what all human beings do when they
encounter something beyond their reach: they create a myth. I find this aspect
of the film captivating. It’s an experiment in structure, tone, and
characterization that never completely works and yet the sheer ambition of the
acting and writing is impressive. Realistically, I think in 20 years’ time, we
may finally be ready to see Steve Jobs impact on our future and look back on
his humanity through that, but for now we’re left with an entertaining,
emotionally stunned legend. But just because the film doesn’t work in its
entirety, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own value. I’d much rather watch a
fascinating error that (purposefully or not) gives us something different and
feeds into our own worship of fame and genius, than watch another generic
biopic that simply checks off boxes on someone’s life.
Grade: B-
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