Steve Jobs
Danny Boyle (2015)
The top left-hand side of the theatrical release poster for Steve Jobs includes the film’s title and the names of the main actors, the director and the screenwriter. In the bottom right-hand corner is Michael Fassbender as Jobs, shown in sideview and from just below the waist. A small, distant figure in jeans and a black rollneck sweater, he looks deep in thought. In between the words and this image is white space, which occupies most of the poster. Although this isn’t conventionally appealing, the self-confidence needed to eschew conventional appeal makes the poster rather impressive; besides, the streamlined monochrome look is coherent with Apple design and with how you see the real Steve Jobs in your mind’s eye. The hi-tech world realised in Danny Boyle’s film – which features sleek production design (Guy Hendrix Dyas) and slick editing (Elliot Graham) – complements Aaron Sorkin’s structurally distinctive screenplay. The source material is Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography, published very shortly after its subject’s death in 2011, but Steve Jobs, as adapted by Sorkin, is essentially a three-act theatre play, with a predominantly backstage setting. Each act focuses on the minutes leading up to the official launch of a famous Jobs product: the Apple Macintosh in 1984; the NeXT Computer in 1988; the iMac in 1998. (Boyle and Sorkin work only a few flashbacks into the narrative.) The tension of the launch, in all three cases, is increased when, as Jobs prepares to go on stage, recurring dramatis personae appear, to pose awkward questions and deliver uncomfortable home truths. The behind-closed-doors ambience is reinforced by there being only two external sequences in the whole film – one of these very near the end, out on the roof of the building within which the iMac is about to be unveiled.
It sounds intriguing yet Steve Jobs is disappointing. The disappointment sets in quickly because it’s soon clear that the style and structure of the narrative aren’t going to change, and how Boyle and Sorkin see their control-freak protagonist. (This $30m movie is proving a commercial disappointment too: over a month after its US release, box-office receipts have just inched past the $20m mark.) Reviewing David Fincher’s Gone Girl last year, Anthony Lane compared the film unfavourably with the same director’s The Social Network and asked the tongue-in-cheek question, ‘Who could have predicted that a film about murder, betrayal, and deception would be less exciting than a film about a Web site?’ Aaron Sorkin, as the writer of The Social Network, might seem the ideal person to dramatise the life of another IT pioneer but Steve Jobs, in spite of its striking look and superficially daring structure, is located in biopic territory that feels more familiar than the Mark Zuckerberg story. The two movies have some apparently common elements. Steve Jobs’s treatment of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) – the nerd Jobs leaves behind – recalls Zuckerberg’s treatment of Eduardo Saverin. But the relationship of Jobs and Wozniak, largely because of the way the latter keeps turning up as a conscience-pricking thorn in the side of Jobs, plays out mechanically. Also mechanical (and phony) is how easily the various Jobs’ discomforters are able to penetrate his guard. They include, as well as Wozniak, the Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels); Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), a member of the original Mac development team; Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), with whom Jobs lived and had a child; and their daughter, Lisa (played, at different ages, by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine). The marketing executive Joanna Hoffmann (Kate Winslet) has a somewhat different function. Continuously loyal to Jobs, Joanna is an exasperated, chiding-but-protective Jewish-mother figure – although she’s no older than her impulsive, autocratic boss. Like him, she’s very loquacious. The relentless verbal sparring in The Social Network was persuasively character-based but that’s true only to a limited extent in Steve Jobs. In the early stages, you can believe the main man keeps talking because he’s a highly competitive individual and in order to stay ahead of the demons he has on his tail. But, then, everyone keeps talking. After a while, you feel it’s Aaron Sorkin rather than any of the people on the screen who’s determined always to have the last word.
Danny Boyle starts proceedings with a bit of news film, an excerpt from a black-and-white television interview with Arthur C Clarke, who predicts life in the computer age at the start of the twenty-first century. The appearance of a famous science-fiction writer in a preface to the film’s world of science fact is an effective touch but, while there’s plenty of talk about the various Apple products in the course of Steve Jobs, the IT theme is oddly superficial. I happened to see Steve Jobs and Taxi on the same afternoon, in that order. Jafar Panahi’s film – and the ubiquity of iPads and iPhones in present-day Tehran – helped put the subject of Boyle’s film in a rather different light. No doubt Boyle and Sorkin were sensitive to the fact that, in the four years since Jobs’s death, there had already been several documentaries made about him, as well as the biopic Jobs (2013), but the movie’s shallow coverage of his work tends to muffle the special significance of his achievement. Jobs is keen to compare himself with ‘artists’ (his – or, at least, Aaron Sorkin’s – word), including Einstein, Picasso and Bob Dylan. His doing so comes across as arrogant less because of what Steve Jobs actually created than because he’s presented here as a figure in a generic price-of-fame story. The explanation of his screwed-up personality is similarly familiar. Jobs was raised by adoptive parents; according to the film-makers, his rejection not only by his biological mother but also by the first-choice adoptive couple continued to eat away at him. As if to get his own back, he wants to deny close relationships. He’s contemptuous of Chrisann and, in the 1984 section, is still denying paternity of Lisa. He consistently refuses to give Steve Wozniak, with whom Jobs gave birth to Apple, what Wozniak sees as his due. You wouldn’t guess from Steve Jobs that, by the time of the 1998 third act, Jobs was married and the father of three more children (his marriage to Laurene Powell lasted from 1991 until his death twenty years later). Boyle and Sorkin are determined to present Jobs as unfavourably as possible: they accentuate the negative in his personal life; they skimp on what he achieved in his work. You get little sense of what made Jobs a global entrepreneur. The film weakly implies that he made billions because he was a bastard. It then doesn’t allow him even to be a world-class bastard.
Michael Fassbender’s portrait of Steve Jobs doesn’t help matters – a function of the actor’s emerging screen persona rather than lack of sympathy with the character he’s playing. In the first few minutes of the film, Fassbender’s deft, crisp delivery of his lines is almost elating – even as you’re aware that the pleasure you’re feeling is largely relief, after his heavy-going yet hollow playing of Macbeth. Throughout, Fassbender uses his lean body and alertness to express, convincingly, the intelligence of a man who thinks and speaks quickly, often in order to avoid thinking deeply. I found Fassbender, as usual, interesting to watch but I do wonder if his characteristic coolness makes him too chilly and remote to carry the kind of superior popular movie that Steve Jobs aimed to be – and if he’s a main reason why the film has missed its box-office target. (I hope I’m wrong in saying this but his work in Jane Eyre and Shame in 2011 remains by some way Fassbender’s best to date in main roles. It may be no coincidence that Rochester is a leading man sui generis – it’s Jane with whom the audience is meant to connect – and that Brandon in Shame is conceived as an absorbing case study rather than an engaging personality.) In Steve Jobs, Fassbender is hardly unique in giving the impression of a highly skilled actor going through the motions – it’s just that, because he has the leading role, it matters most in his case. All the main players are good (Jeff Daniels especially so) and you sense their enthusiasm for Sorkin’s rapid-fire, relentlessly witty dialogue. Yet everyone seems to be delivering an accomplished turn – the performances leave no trace. As for Danny Boyle, we already know – from Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours and, more positively, the London Olympics opening ceremony – that he’s a whiz at putting on a show. Steve Jobs sheds no light on whether he can do more.
17 November 2015