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| Michael Fassbender in "Steve Jobs" |
"Steve Jobs", the new movie written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle, never wants to be the birth to death portrait of a famous person the way we normally see them filtered through the Hollywood studios. It's much more deliberate and planned. Watching it is like the equivalent of upgrading from the Blackberry to the iPhone: all the bumps are gone, and nothing but smooth edges remain. And it's intentions are noble, not unlike its subject, Steve Jobs, the mastermind behind Apple the company, and especially, Apple the way of life. It's divided into three acts, like an opera, going behind the scenes of three major public events in the history of Apple. We begin in 1984 before the release of the Macintosh, jump to 1988 for the failed release of NeXT Inc., and finish in 1998, before the world was subjected to that see-through, colorful machine of dreams, the iMac. Each of these events is given an equal amount of time, and therefore an equal amount of importance. We see Jobs, played by Michael Fassbender, transform from an asshole with slicked back hair and pressed white shirt to an asshole with buzzed gray hair and suffocating black turtleneck. Jobs doesn't really change and we recognize this. Sorkin, who so expertly opened up our minds to the frustrations and passions of Mark Zuckerberg in his screenplay for "The Social Network" five years ago takes almost complete control from director Danny Boyle. The dialogue, more than any other aspect of the movie, is the star. Everything we want from an Aaron Sorkin script is here: dialogue spoken at break-neck speed, witty asides, polemical speeches, even man-splaining. Taking inspiration and telling details from the bestselling Walter Isaacson biography from 2011, Sorkin remains deeply preoccupied with our collective imagination of Steve Jobs and Apple as he was with Zuckerberg and Facebook. Why do you think Sorkin had Zuckerberg constantly refreshing his friend request to an old girlfriend at the end of "The Social Network"? The billionaire who creates a company that connects the world isn't relatable, but you know what is relatable? The billionaire who doesn't have a girlfriend. That scene worked and "The Social Network" (an appropriate companion piece to this film) struck the absurdly difficult tone of mixing modern history with real human emotion, something that "Steve Jobs" does not. Throughout its three-act structure we see Jobs' daughter, Lisa Brennan, increasingly become part of humanizing this man. She begins as a rejected offspring and somehow becomes his ultimate savior, even inspiring the invention of the iPod for goodness sakes. Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), his dedicated assistant and confidante, tells him that she should be the most important thing, and that she should be the priority, not the computer, not the ideas, not the ambitions. The other Steve, Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) even speaks out loud the films thesis statement: "You can be brilliant and decent at the same time." Or something along those lines. But do we believe any of this, did any of it really happen this way? That doesn't matter to Sorkin, he needs Jobs to be this way, in order to make sense of his influence, his power. Yet it feels false, and the film, while brilliant in spurts becomes just decent in the end. What truly matters is that this man existed at all, that his ideas took flight. What matters is what he gave the world, and you know what doesn't matter, if he cared about his daughter and was a nice guy.
