New movie review: Steve Jobs

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.

Michael Stuhlbarg, Fassbender, and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs.

Conversely, the movie is fairly empty when it comes to Jobs’ work. By choosing to show us only these product launches – the Macintosh, the NEXT, and the iMac, respectively – Sorkin fails to explore Jobs’ creative process. It is the ultimate tell-not-show movie as we hear in dialogue over and over how brilliant he is but never actually see that brilliance in action. Some of this falls on Boyle’s doorstep, but the density of Sorkin’s script leaves little room to play with form.

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.

Jeff Daniels in Steve Jobs.

The rest of the cast swirling around him is stellar as well, beginning with Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Jobs’ head of marketing and closest confidant. Hoffman is the film’s moral center and the one person in Jobs’ life with the wherewithal to stand up to him as she stands by him. Winslet matches Fassbender beat for beat and is able to project strength even as she shows warmth.

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.

New movie review: The Martian

Matt Damon plays an astronaut stranded on Mars in director Ridley Scott's The Martian.

There is nothing quite as satisfying as seeing a talented person work. It really does not matter the craft. Watching a skilled carpenter build a table can be as pleasing as watching a concert pianist perform or a top chef prepare a delicious meal. It should not be terribly revolutionary to suggest competence is appealing. It is one of the reasons the spy genre is so durable. Spies are ceaselessly competent. They accomplish with ease tasks that would confound us mere mortals, and that is why they are so damned fun to watch.

There are no spies in The Martian, but there is competence to spare, and as a result, the film is a joyous exercise in smart, big-budget moviemaking. From director Ridley Scott and writer Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir, The Martian is the story of astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon), who is marooned on Mars after a storm forces a speedy evacuation by the crew of the Ares III mission. Thinking Watney has died in the storm, the rest of the crew takes off and heads back to Earth.

When their error is discovered by mission control, an all-out rescue effort begins, and the film cuts back and forth between the frantic attempts by NASA to reach the stranded astronaut and Watney’s pragmatic, life-extending measures. The film settles into a rhythm early. Problems arise, and intelligent people solve them. Another problem demands another solution, and so on until either Watney is saved or a problem comes up that cannot be solved.

Mercifully, there is no villain in the film – no aliens, no shadowy government agencies, no one working at cross-purposes to the characters. The enemies are time and space. Watney has limited resources and infinite space. He must survive on his own long enough to allow the rescue mission to reach him. A botanist, he devises a way to farm potatoes on the once-barren planet. This will buy him some time. It is up to mission control back home to solve the space problem, which is that they have a lot of space to cover to get to Watney.

Kristen Wiig and Chiwetel Ejiofor in The Martian.

Populated by an appealingly eclectic and talented cast, including Chiwetel Ejiofor, Benedict Wong, Jeff Daniels, Donald Glover, and Kristen Wiig, the ground team at NASA gets to work. Under incredible pressure and with no margin for error, they propose to send an unmanned probe to Mars with supplies to keep Watney alive until the next planned manned mission arrives. When this fails, it falls to the crew of the Ares III, still on their way back to Earth, to decide if they will risk their lives to attempt a rescue of the man they left behind.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who made his name writing intricate, puzzle-box-type stories such as Cabin in the Woods and the television show Lost, Goddard’s screenplay is straightforward and workmanlike. More Apollo 13 than 2001: A Space Odyssey, the script is less interested in the meaning of life than in the extension of it. For The Martian, the former approach works, and Goddard and Scott smartly give all the action set pieces and narrative developments room to breathe rather than overstuffing the spaces between with needless philosophizing.

Movies like this work best when allowed to bask in silence, and on Mars, silence is the one thing not in short supply. While the top-flight cast also includes Jessica Chastain, Michael Peña, and Kate Mara, among others, the film lives and dies with the lonely, life-and-death struggle of Watney and with Damon’s portrayal of the stranded astronaut. Long stretches of the film are inhabited by just Watney and the video diary he keeps, partially for the record and partially for his sanity. In these moments of quiet solitude, the audience is allowed to feel his grief and isolation but also his hope.

Recent comments in the press aside, Damon has a charming, everyman-like quality about him that makes you want to root for him. The character is witty and affable – two traits Damon has excelled at displaying in nearly all his roles – but the dire nature of his situation is never once out of mind. Damon’s well calibrated performance is a perfect balance of light and dark, playful and practical, which is the same tightrope the film itself walks so well.

Scott has fallen out of critical favor as a director in recent years, releasing a string of indifferently received films (A Good Year; American Gangster; Body of Lies; Robin Hood) followed by three highly divisive ones (Prometheus; The Counselor; Exodus: Gods and Kings). There was nothing necessarily wrong with these works – I happen to love Prometheus – but something was missing from most of them. With The Martian, Scott proves he is the same talented director who long ago brought us Alien and Blade Runner, as well as the relatively more recent Gladiator.

Here, Scott provides the same sense of awe-inspiring wonder that has marked his best work, but it is buoyed by an inspiring story of genuine human accomplishment. The Martian vistas are the kind of breathtaking visual achievement Scott can conjure on a whim, and this movie is full of beautiful images, but its greatest success is its people.

Working from Goddard’s script and Weir’s story, Scott astonishes with more than just visuals. Think how rare that is to see a big, effects-driven movie, which this clearly is, and to be amazed by something more than how pretty everything is. In The Martian, we are amazed simply to watch smart people confront impossible odds with determination and hope.

See it? Yes.

Something Wild: Greta Gerwig on dangerous women

Melanie Griffith stars in Jonathan Demme's 1986 comedy Something Wild.

Bear with me a moment. I am going to get a little geeky. Of course, if this site is evidence of anything, it is of my ability to be geeky when it comes to films. Last Cinema Standing was founded on the idea that seeing a movie in the theater is the best way to see a movie. Nothing matches the experience of a room full of people awed into silence when the lights go out. No matter what shines up on the screen next, that beautiful moment of darkness before the movie starts is full of possibilities. I love it.

Everything is digital now – the projection, the sound, hell, sometimes most of a movie. I am no purist. I understand how and why we have moved in this direction. That is fine, but there is just something about hearing the pop of a real soundtrack while watching celluloid projected, warts and all, on the big screen. I like the scratches. I like the dirt. It is tangible. You can feel it. You can sense it. It makes the experience more real.

Each month, the IFC Center in New York City dusts off the projector and shows a classic film the way it is meant to be seen. I wrote last year about the inaugural screening in the Celluloid Dreams series, Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo and a tribute to cinematographer Gordon Willis. Last Tuesday, I attended the latest screening in the series, Jonathan Demme’s screwball comedy ode Something Wild (1986).

The film was followed by a question-and-answer session with actress-writer Greta Gerwig, who was there to promote her upcoming film Mistress America, of which the audience was then treated to a sneak preview. Gerwig talked at length about Something Wild and other films of its ilk and the inspiration she drew from them in writing her newest paean to Generation Y’s search for purpose. The discussion was a fascinating look into the process of a gifted young writer and performer.

Greta Gerwig speaks at the IFC Center.

“In some ways, your impression of [the movies you’re inspired by] is more useful than what the thing actually is,” she said. “I thought about that a lot when I saw Mr. Turner. It starts when he’s coming back from Amsterdam, and the shopkeeper asks him what he was doing, and I think he says, ‘I was looking at the Rembrandts.’ And it placed you so much in that time when you wouldn’t have access to those paintings. You’d have to go to the place, look at the paintings, and do your best to remember what was great about them. It’s such a different experience of art than having it be accessible to you all the time. So while we would watch things, also sometimes our memory of things would be the feeling we were looking to recreate.”

Among the many influences Gerwig named were Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan, and of course Something Wild, as well as the films of George Cukor, Ernst Lubitsch, and Howard Hawks and novels by Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth. It is an eclectic list, to say the least, but the common thread seems to be people trying to find where they belong or figuring out how to fit in once they have found a place.

Something Wild – which I highly recommend; it is on Netflix if you cannot find a 35-millimeter screening near you – follows yuppie Charles (Jeff Daniels) on a weekend fling with wild girl Lulu (Melanie Griffith), who, for all intents and purposes, kidnaps him and coerces him into an odyssey of drinking, fighting, and law breaking. It is the most fun Charles has had in a long time, breaking free of the shackles of his mundane life and letting his hair down, albeit by force mostly.

If that basic description sounds familiar, it is because modern romantic comedies have taken the trope of the free-spirited girl who teaches the uptight guy to have fun and turned it into a formula. However, modern films of this type are almost exclusively about the man. The girl is usually perfect, if a bit peppy, and the boy realizes maybe he needs more of that in his life – both pep and perfection. Something Wild and other like-minded films concern themselves with the stories of their women. Lulu is a complex person with goals and desires of her own, a fully developed female character, which Gerwig lamented the lack of in modern cinema.

“Melanie Griffith in [Something Wild] and Patricia Arquette in After Hours and even Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose – it’s a kind of female character that I feel really disappeared from movies,” said Gerwig. “They’re dangerous women. They’re not just being delightful for you. They could maybe get you into something that might get you killed, or you’re not fully sure their morality. Every third thing that comes out of their mouths is a lie. They put on lots of costumes. They’re amazing characters.”

Lola Kirke and Greta Gerwig star in Mistress America.

Gerwig’s Mistress America character, Brooke, is descended from this line of dangerous women. She is a screw-up overflowing with self-confidence and a failure who senses success is always right around the corner. She is no role model, but she fancies herself one when she takes her soon-to-be step-sister (a fabulous Lola Kirke) under her wing.

Even the dangerous woman, however, is a bit of a trope, but the beauty of Gerwig and director-co-writer Noah Baumbach’s script is that it deepens the character and subverts the cliché. Ultimately, the person to whom Brooke is most dangerous is herself. Others will recover from her actions and move on, but she has to live with herself every day.

In Something Wild, Lulu faces the same dilemma. She does not like who she is or who she was, and she has no idea who she should be. She lies. She puts on costumes. She goes by fake names. No one in the world has to know the real her – but she does. The audience may see the film through Charlie’s eyes, but he is not the protagonist. That would be Lulu, and the movie hinges on her feelings and her choices. For an ’80s throwback to the comedies of the ‘40s, it is a pretty radical idea, but if we really take a hard look at the current cinema landscape, it might be even more radical now.