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It’s not a total wipeout, but the omission of its presence on the awards circuit, except for two performances, is not without reason. Steve Jobs is a unique piece of cinema, but I’m not entirely sold on it being a completely successful one. There’s plenty to admire here, and just as much to find frustrating.
All things go back to the script. Aaron Sorkin and his obsession with the Great Flawed Man, inevitably white, affluent, and something of a raging asshole with to pontificate ad nauseam, is felt strongly here. Sorkin has his fans, but I’ve never been huge fan of his work. I find him in love with his ponderous verbosity, and find this scripts have a tendency to chase their own tails unless a strong directorial presence is found to guide them into something else.
Steve Jobs is not that movie. Sorkin created a film with three very clear and pronounced acts, playing less like a film and more like a filmed stage play. We check in on the same small group of characters at three different product launches, each of which finds Jobs in full-on demanding, ego-centric son-of-a-bitch mode. Orbiting him are a group of characters far more sympathetic and engaging. Why did Joanna Hoffman, who by all accounts seems a smart, capable woman with a low tolerance for bullshit, take his abuse and act as his wrangler for so long? Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, and Crisann Brennan were frequent targets of his abusive tirades and put downs, why do they so frequently return to his side?
None of these questions gets satisfactory answers, but Jobs gets an unearned third-act bit of sympathetic character development. There’s no meaningful engagement with Steve Jobs, the person, and instead we witness something of myth-building around someone who maybe didn’t quite deserve as much as he’s received. Like Wozniak calls him out on, Jobs wasn’t a creator, an engineer, couldn’t write code or program anything, he was a great marketing man, though, and a solid idea-man. But a tech genius? Well, the script would have you believing that, and that he additionally wasn’t such a bad guy. After all, his frequent dick-headed attempts to skirt custody and responsibility of his oldest daughter has to do with his pent-up daddy issues, which is just lazy writing on Sorkin’s part.
Even stranger is how relatively calm Danny Boyle’s direction feels. Normally a film-maker of tremendous energy, perhaps too much at times, and kinetic visuals, Steve Jobs is smothered in Great Man film tropes. Boyle’s direction often feels like it’s being steamrolled by Sorkin’s words, whereas the similar The Social Network had a director wrestling with the immense verbal passages into montages and other visuals that produced some energy. There’s not enough of that in Steve Jobs. The montages to catch us up on the passages of time between the three acts feel like Boyle’s signature style, but then it goes back to glossy, smartly dressed BBC television adaptation mode.
Well, at least the performances sing, loudly and clearly. Leading the entire thing is Michael Fassbender. Many actors have broken under the challenge of finding the rhythms and musculature of Sorkin’s dialog, but Fassbender breaks the dialog around him. He finds the current wave to ride on, and sails through the film. It’s a laudable performance, and the film only works as much as it does because of his lead. It’s hard to imagine any of the other, and numerous, actors rumored for the role in this part now.
Everyone else could be argued as a supporting player, and they’re all top-notch actors. Granted, Winslet’s weird accent (supposedly Polish mixed with some other things) wanders far too much, but her various tics and exasperations feel real and lived in. Seth Rogen is solid as Steve Wozniak, a casting choice that felt like an inevitability from the moment this film was announced. Michael Stuhlbarg and Jeff Daniels turn in solid variations on characters they could probably do in their sleep by this point. While the film garnered a Supporting Actress nomination, rightly so, it was for the wrong actress. Katherine Waterston’s beat-down ex-girlfriend and mother to his ignored daughter is the standout among the supporting players. Consistently returning with less screen time but more battled-scarred poetry, Waterston is one of the few players who loudly screams for Jobs to be held accountable for his actions. Naturally, she’s nowhere to be seen during the final confrontation between father and daughter.
Having no interest in actually confronting its subject matter, or holding him accountable, Steve Jobs is happy to instead play him as just misunderstood. Frankly, I think Jobs, and Sorkin, should have listened when Wozniak screams out in frustration that “You can be decent and gifted at the same time.” Pity no one listened to him. Jobs, as witnessed here, was a bit of an asshole, but the film constantly sides with him. And the less said about that surprisingly happy ending, complete with an eye-roll inducing nudge and wink about the iPod the better.
