Steve Jobs (3/5 Stars)

Steve Jobs, an unconventional biopic about one of the founders of Apple, was written for the screen by the great Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network), directed by the great Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), and stars the great Michael Fassbender (Hunger, Shame) as the titular tech mogul. It is not a great movie and it seems to be mostly Aaron Sorkin’s fault. Let’s jump into it right away.

Jumping into it right away is the first big problem. Sorkin has structured his movie unconventionally to say the least. The movie is divided into three acts, each act being the hour before a product release. In 1984 it is the Macintosh computer, in 1987 it is the Next computer, and in 1996 it is the iMac. The hour before the house is full of chanting fanboys is a very nerve-wracking busybody time. Steve goes around being a total dick to everybody else in the story. In the first act he must have the Macintosh say “hello.” There is a system error and the technical people in the background cannot make it work. Who cares, they posit. It is two seconds in an hour and a half presentation. Steve does not take many perfectly reasonable explanations for an answer and at one point threatens a subordinate with public humiliation. He also gets angry when they can’t turn off the fire exit lights during the presentation. He also refuses to grant his co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen, interesting casting choice) a favor in mentioning the Apple2 team, seemingly because he does not personally approve of the product even though it is the company’s only bestseller. I have no doubt that all of these things actually happened. But that does not mean it is good movie making to dwell on these things. Or to put it a better way, it is not good movie making to only dwell on the aggravating things that happen before a public presentation. Why am I watching a biopic on Steve Jobs? Is it to dwell on the perfidies and sins of a very successful and famous man? Or is it to gain some greater understanding of why he was successful warts and all? This movie shows the warts but it doesn’t show or explain the greatness. The result is a main character that engenders no sympathy. We get hints at why his products are successful. At one point he says he got rid of the Newton hand held device because of its stylus. It does not utilize all of the digits on one’s hand, he explains. Unfortunately this is a throw away line and the enlightenment ends there. I want to know how he got to that realization. What explains why he had that insight? Once that is established he can be as much of an asshole as he apparently was and the movie will still work. But here, I’m just watching an asshole period. I don’t want to do that.

It fills very odd to say that Danny Boyle should not have been chosen to direct a particular movie, but there you go. Again the problem starts with the movie’s structure. It takes place in basically real time in only three places. If that sounds like the structure of a play instead of a movie, that’s because it is the structure of a play. Before each presentation Steve has a moment with four people, his technical engineer (Michael Stuhlberg), his estranged girlfriend and daughter, Steve Wozniak, and the CEO Jeff Scully (Jeff Daniels). In these conversations the characters speak as if they are in a play. What do I mean by that? In a play, because the writer does not have the ability to easily leave the scene and go to a completely different place, the writer makes the characters speak at great length about what happened in the past and how they feel about it. People in plays do not speak the way people do because the audience would not understand what is going on. This generally does not work in movies because the writer can go wherever he wants to go. Movies are not confined by space and time. So it does not make sense when the characters give exposition that everybody in the scene already knows. This happens frequently and leads to several characters saying several times inane things like “I already know that” and “didn’t we already have this argument?” A line that really takes the cake happens near the end where Steve Jobs having gone through the four torments for a third time wonders aloud if he has to see three ghosts before every presentation he does. That’s sort of funny but it is not good funny. The only reason Steve Jobs sees three ghosts is because Aaron Sorkin wrote the movie that way. This joke is the equivalent of somebody choosing to wear an idiotic shirt, pointing to it, and saying ‘who wears a shirt like this? What an idiot.” In essence it is the admission of clumsy writing and I’m glad Sorkin can laugh at himself but I would rather he did not write so clumsily.

But the greater probem with play writing is that it does not conform to the attention span of a movie audience. As Charlie Kaufman once said, “Theater is live. Movies are dead.” The immediate presence of a human being in front of you is more exciting than seeing one on the screen. How many times have you seen a three-hour play that felt like an hour and a half movie? Because of that, characters in plays can play speak (talking at length about the past and their feelings) without the audience growing tired of it. It generally does not work in movies because it gets tedious. Because movies can show instead of tell this is what they generally do. There are ways around this. A famous one is the Sorkin walk-and-talk but I had not really seen it pulled off until I watched “Birdman” and that was with an extraordinary directorial effort. The characters playspeak but it still works because the entire movie is in one continuos shot and that lends an immediate presence to the action. But “Steve Jobs” is not made in that way. It is made in the purely cinematic way that Danny Boyle generally directs his movies. It does not fit the way it needs to fit. That is what I mean when I say Danny Boyle is badly cast.

The movie has plenty of good stuff in it. The talent is just not focused on what will make the movie work as a whole. You have got a bunch of great people working at odds with one another. The silver lining is that the stuff that does not work is generally innovative. That means the astute filmmaker can watch this movie and have a good idea of why certain choices do not work. They may also have a hint at a good movie that was lost. Take the performance of Michael Fassbender. Notice how the character of Steve Jobs is noticeably softened (somewhat) and friendlier in the third act. What happened between the multiple failures of the first and second act and the ultimate triumph of the third act? It seems like the character changed and stopped being such an asshole. Perhaps that transformation would make a good movie someday. More conventional sure but better.