I’ve been dormant for too long, but today brings three new reviews of movies that all center around the theme of perfection whether that’s achieved through winning a campaign, achieving a Michelin star, or revolutionizing computers. I’ll start off with the best of the bunch…
What Works: “Steve Jobs” will leave people with wildly different reactions, and I could see how reasonable people could walk out of the theater arguing about whether it’s an immaturish off-Broadway play or the rare biopic that actually puts you inside the mind of its subject. I’m firmly in the latter camp, and the marriage of Aaron Sorkin (who wrote the script) and Steve Jobs is an ideal match since Sorkin’s work has often touched on the theme of how to subvert mediocrity and achieve greatness.
Danny Boyle delivers sharp, clear-eyed direction but this is a script-driven movie all the way, and Sorkin structures it as a series of verbal duels between Jobs and various people right before three of his biggest product launches. We’re seeing electric psychological battles between the personal (represented by Jobs old girlfriend and his daughter) and professional; the genial (represented by Seth Rogen and Michael Stuhlbarg as slightly-bland, nice-guy tech whizzes) and the mercurial; and business (represented by Jeff Daniels) vs. true innovation. The best of these–in my opinion–is Jobs’ complicated relationship with Daniels’ John Scully, the former Pepsi CEO that Jobs personally recruited for Apple, a bond that starts out as father-son before souring. When Fassbender and Daniels are on-screen, it’s hard to take your eyes off them. Oh, and it’s not for nothing that Fassbender is also fantastic, taking the kind-of role that Bradley Cooper usually plays and finding hidden notes of sympathy and vulnerability in a guy who could be an unlikable tyrant in another person’s hands.
What Doesn’t: The duels between Jobs and Rogen’s Wozniak are essentially repeated with the Stuhlbarger character, and after awhile we kind-of get it that genial, nice-guy mensches don’t like working with Jobs. [It probably doesn’t help that even though Jobs is forceful in his pursuits against them, he isn’t exactly wrong either.] I also wasn’t entirely moved by the conflict between Jobs and the mother of his daughter (Inherent Vice’s Katherine Waterston, doing her best to channel Jennifer Jason Leigh and mostly coming up short) either. The scenes with Jobs and his (at first illegitimate) daughter are less sure-footed than the professional competitions, perhaps because Sorkin isn’t really as interested in whether someone is a good father as he is in whether they’re attaining excellence in a mediocre age. And that’s more than okay, but you’ll be forgiven if your attention wanders during father-daughter moments.
What I Would Have Done Differently: There will be those that will be disappointed that this isn’t a linear biopic, but I doubt they are very many since both this film and the traditional, Ashton-Kutcher starring biopic “Jobs” underperformed at the box office. Sorkin’s approach is dazzling, innovative, tenacious, ideologically rigid, and sometimes headache-inducing, but what better monument to Jobs himself? The fact that the movie imposes its will on you as relentlessly as if you were in an actual debate with Jobs is a testament to just how effective it is, and it’s no small miracle that Fassbender (who was 180 degrees different but no less impressive as a taciturn cowboy in this summer’s “Slow West”) pulls that off so well.