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| Michael Fassbender stars as Steve Jobs in director Danny Boyle's new film Steve Jobs. |
Apple founder Steve Jobs is a hard character to pin down. Some
want to paint him as a god of the tech industry, a forward-thinking innovator,
and a full-stop genius. Others think of him as closer to the devil, a
temperamental tyrant, and a fraud who was not responsible for half the things
for which he gets credit. As ever, the truth is likely somewhere between the
two extremes, but death has a polarizing effect on the way we interpret the
legacies of prominent figures. Look at Ronald Reagan.
Since his death from cancer in 2011, the company he founded
has only grown in power, influence, and ubiquity, and there have been countless
attempts to place Jobs’ contributions to the culture in a larger context. They
feature titles such as Genius by Design
and How Steve Jobs Changed the World.
In many cases, though, they are just his name followed by a colon and some
positive or negative descriptor, depending on the point the makers want to
communicate.
For the new film from director Danny Boyle and writer Aaron
Sorkin, the filmmakers drop the descriptor. It is just Steve Jobs. It gives the impression this will be the definitive
portrait of the man and his machines, but it is not that, nor does it try to
be. Instead, Sorkin’s script is broken down into three snapshots of Jobs’ life
– or rather, his career, following as it does three product launches that
define the arc of his time with Apple.
Sorkin is an undeniably good writer, and he has given us a
slew of great television shows (The West
Wing; Sports Night; The Newsroom) and films (A Few Good Men; An American President; The
Social Network). As ever, his dialogue crackles with the humor and
intelligence for which he is known. The problem is that the snapshot structure
does not work for telling this story. There is simultaneously too much
condensed into these three moments and too much left out.
To the first point, by sticking rigidly to this structure,
save for two brief flashback sequences, Sorkin must include everything he wants
us to know about Jobs in dialogue set on just three days in his life. There are
five or six main characters, and each one’s story has a beginning, middle, and
end, but because we are seeing only three specific days, each character arc
happens on the same contrived timeline.
Movies are contrivances, but this stretches credulity. By
the time Jobs points out how every product launch, it seems like everyone goes
to the same bar, gets drunk, and tells him what they really think, you just get
angry at Sorkin for clearly being aware of this flaw but taking no steps to
address it.
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| Michael Stuhlbarg, Fassbender, and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs. |
Boyle is an excellent director, but this is his most restrained
and constricted film – an assessment that includes 127 Hours, about a man literally trapped in one spot for nearly the
duration of the film. Gone for most of the runtime is Boyle’s usual flair for
dramatic camera movement and clever, propulsive editing. It feels almost
workmanlike, which is unfortunate because the best part of Boyle’s films has
always been the directorial stamp he places on them.
However, where Sorkin’s work constrains the director to a
degree, his words give all the performers the chance to soar, none more than
Michael Fassbender as Jobs. Fassbender is a wonderful, chameleon-like actor who
has shown his range in projects as diverse as 12 Years a Slave, Shame,
the X-Men films, and Frank. As Jobs, he finds a new part to
play – the petulant genius – and he is astounding. Though Fassbender little
resembles Jobs nor really sounds like him, he discovers the character of Jobs.
His performance is less an imitation of the man than an interpretation, and it
works beautifully.
Fassbender, a longtime stage actor with a facility for
language that helps tremendously with Sorkin’s dialogue, is by turns menacing
and gentle. He thankfully avoids the pitfalls so many other actors fall into
when portraying tech geniuses – often playing them as somewhere on the autism
spectrum – and instead builds brick by brick the figure of a confident, volatile
icon. Nothing in the film would work without the steady, grounded work of
Fassbender. The film necessarily revolves around Jobs, like a hurricane, and
Fassbender is the perfectly calm eye at the center of the storm.
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| Jeff Daniels in Steve Jobs. |
As former Apple CEO John Sculley, Jeff Daniels is given a
fairly obvious archetype to play in Jobs’ father figure, but Daniels finds
nuance and shading in the two men’s relationship that is not strictly on the
page. In the middle section, the film’s best sequence has Sculley asking Jobs
why the world thinks he fired his protégé from Apple.
It is one of the only scenes where Boyle is able to liven up
the proceedings with a series of rapid-fire edits between their present-day
argument and Jobs’ removal from Apple, the film’s only extended flashback. The
editing ramps up the tension, while Daniels and Fassbender bring energy and passion
to the conversation. Sculley is the only person in the film Jobs consistently
out-maneuvers, and Daniels finds in Sculley a beaten man who refuses to go down
without a fight.
In the “character actors who deserve to work more” category,
we have Michael Stuhlbarg and Katherine Waterston in small but pivotal roles as
Jobs’ employee and ex-girlfriend, respectively. Stuhlbarg, who was excellent in
this year’s Pawn Sacrifice and will
also appear in Trumbo, is one of my
favorite actors and one of Hollywood’s best reactors. His changes in expression
say a hundred things his words never could, and his character’s hurt silences
are among the most affecting moments in the film.
Waterston, who was tremendous in last year’s Inherent Vice and the best thing about
the Alex Ross Perry misfire Queen of
Earth this year, stuns in a few brief scenes as the mother of Jobs’
daughter. As written, she is all fire and fury, but Waterston is able to create
levels of sorrow and repressed rage that even Sorkin may have missed.
What we are left with is an often brilliant, sometimes
frustrating film about an often brilliant, sometimes frustrating man. Boyle
perhaps does not do enough as a director to rein in Sorkin’s more writerly
tendencies, but the performances are so magical that it is impossible to look
away. By refusing to take a clear stance on the man or his work, Steve Jobs functions more like a
Rorschach test for viewers. You will see in Jobs what you want to see in him –
saint or sinner, paragon or pretender – but the film’s real achievement is that
no matter what you see, afterward, you are more likely to see a human.
See it? Yes.
