How much of a shit do you have to be IRL so that the best people can say of you in the wake is “he might have been on the spectrum.” Four years after the death of Mr. Apple, Danny Boyle, Aaron Sorkin and Michael Fassbender have abandoned the apologetic spectrum excuses in favor of, well, it turns out Steve Jobs might have been a tad more complex than Ashton Kutcher would have you believe. It’s not Ashton’s fault – in the wake of Jobs’ recent death, both society and director Joshua Michael Stern wanted to see the man as a flawed visionary. They wasted no time in showing the Steve Jobs who put 1,000 songs in your pocket.
The Boyle/Sorkin vision is a more nuanced one. Steve Jobs isn’t a spectrum dweller, but instead a combination bully, salesman, genius, visionary, judge, jury, executioner, tyrant, asshole and own-worst-enemy. If not for an anticlimactic post-resolution with his daughter, we’d have not known this is man who gave the world the iPod.
Is that not fascinating by itself? Two visions of the same man and in the first he’s the pioneer/savior who put 1,000 songs in your pocket and the latter, he’s the man who created such as a straw-grasping way to connect with his college-age daughter.
I’m happier with the latter interpretation.
Steve Jobs is a play. There are three acts, which may as well all take place on the same set – the backstage of a product unveil to the public. Act I (1984) is the launch of Apple’s world-class level failure, the Macintosh. Act II (1988) is the launch of Jobs’ own disaster, the Next Cube. By Act III, Jobs has returned to Apple to launch a world-class hit, the iMac. And in each pre-stage presentation, we get a new look at Steve Jobs (Fassbender) with respect to the people in his life: his personal assistant Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet, who will be nominated for this role), his co-creating pal Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), his CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), and his daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and Perla Haney-Jardine). Yeah, it’s a fairly mathematical, dare I say, almost computer-like approach to letting us know who Steve Jobs is.
This film is an Aaron Sorkin walkie-talkie special. My guess is he got really jealous after seeing how much backstage walking and talking Michael Keaton did in Birdman or: (Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned What You Did Last Summer). Taking Birdman as a challenge, the script called for jawing strolls in the labyrinthine passages of three (3) arenas! Oh boy, we can walk here and back and maybe circle around and talk in stairwells and green rooms and lighting catwalks and screen posteriors.
Perhaps I should point out – this is an excellent film. There’s no shortage of clever dialogue here. There’s certainly no shortage of dialogue, clever or otherwise, period. In the opening act, Steve is livid about the stage computer being unable to greet the audience audibly. He berates one of his perpetual punching bags, Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), “You
had three weeks. The universe was created in a third of that time.” Hertzfeld counters, “Well, someday, you’ll have to tell us how you did it.” I have no idea if that is a real quote, but it is possibly the line of the year. If you stop to enjoy it, however, you’ll miss something new – imagine a day trader working with people instead of commodities on the stock exchange floor and you have a pretty good idea of where Steve Jobs is.
Does Steve Jobs the film like Steve Jobs the person? Hard to say. It certainly has a profound respect for his capabilities, but often challenges his character, especially with the women in his life – the daughter he’s slow to acknowledge, her mother whom Jobs sees as street filth, and his perpetually overtaxed [read: abused] assistant. My guess is that if the film really hated the man, it wouldn’t have cast Michael Fassbender here, who plays the jerk-you-still-want-to-root-for as well as anybody in the business. Fassbender may well take a nomination here; he isn’t the shoo-in Winslet is, but I be very surprised if his name didn’t get bandied about when the time comes.
♪If Jobs had a name other than “Steve”
Would you call it to his face?
If you had worked with him and would you believe?
Or would you think your boss was one big despot?
And yeah, yeah, Jobs berates
And yeah, yeah, Jobs wants blood
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
What if Jobs was one of us?
Just a guy for whom no fuss?
A fellow in need of trust
Trying to transcend a so-so mind?♫
Rated R, 122 Minutes
D: Danny Boyle
W: Aaron Sorkin
Genre: Talkin’ the talk
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Nerds!
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Action junkies
♪ Parody inspired by “One of Us”
