Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015)

[Gregory]

“I wanted to know more about the launch of the iPad and the newer products. I think they focused too much on the old stuff.”
(Not from a satirical piece.)

I'm going in hoping to find out what the iPhone 7 specs are going to be.

[Luke M]

“I wanted to know more about the launch of the iPad and the newer products. I think they focused too much on the old stuff.”

(Not from a satirical piece.)

I actually feel the movie would've worked better. Even at the movie's close Microsoft's stock hadn't peaked yet. Apple's reign wouldn't start for years and the only hint we get at is not until the final scene.

I don't think the structure worked. It made the movie feel small like 12 Angry Men but without the feeling like you're progressing to an ending. It instead felt cyclical with characters seemingly capable of only referencing the past about moments we already saw - the effect is to render all the years in-between as meaningless.

The film isn't bad. It's just unconventional and doesn't work.

[mfunk9786]

The movie lost me in the last ten minutes or so. Until then, especially in its penultimate moments with Winslet and Rogen and Daniels in succession, the film had pretty stunning power in its exploration of whether or not one's ability to "conduct" a group of skilled people has value or is a smokescreen, and the stuff with Jobs' personal life was handled quite well. Until the final scene with Lisa - some incredibly on-the-nose dialogue that could've been fixed by a better music cue or a different take or the moment not feeling so rushed - and a bit of too little too late lionizing really detracted from what Boyle and Sorkin had built leading up to those final moments. Everyone does their jobs so so well here, that I was surprised by Sorkin of all people winding up as the weak link in the chain, not knowing how to bring this pretty stunning three-act play he had put together to a close in a way befitting the rest of it.

[Altair]

More of an Aaron Sorkin film than a Danny Boyle one (and all the better for it), it's a feast of writing and acting. The cast is phenomenal, eating the great script and dialogue up, with Michael Fassbender as Jobs in particular a stand-out. What's so invigorating is that the film is never afraid to show Jobs to be the unpleasant businessman he was; the three-act structure shows how the times change, but also how Jobs is capable of holding grudges and resentment for decades. Two scenes, in the final act, between Fassbender and Jeff Daniels and Fassbender with Seth Rogan, are likely the best things I'll see in the cinema this year. Alas, the final scene crucially softens the film's bite and feels like Boyle trying to get an unearned emotional payoff. Still, it doesn't torpedo the film as others on here feel.

[Trees]

Fassbender is great, of course. Winslet was also superb. I though the film was pretty good overall. Biopics are always a tough nut to crack. I can't say that this three-period gimmick works better than a more traditional biopic. I actually think a more traditional structure would have allowed the filmmakers to explore more aspects of Job's life, perhaps in more detail, revealing more about him and his effect on the world. The direction from Boyle was serviceable but not excellent.

[beamish13]

Winslet's bizarre Russian/Polish/Midatlantic chimera accent was unbearable.

One thing I did enjoy about it was the pop culture segues between the three different focal points.

[aox]

Winslet's bizarre Russian/Polish/Midatlantic chimera accent was unbearable.

This. Her performance we great. But the fact that her Polish accent got thicker the longer she lived in the US (20 years) was perplexing. It's non-existent in the first act.

Fassbinder gave the best lead male performance this year (that was nominated; otherwise, I would have gone with Elba), IMO.

[Trees]

Winslet's bizarre Russian/Polish/Midatlantic chimera accent was unbearable.

This. Her performance we great. But the fact that her Polish accent got thicker the longer she lived in the US (20 years) was perplexing. It's non-existent in the first act.

Okay, so it wasn't just me who noticed this. How strange. I wonder what the story is behind this.

[domino harvey]

I liked this a lot, though I think this needed a more workhorse-like director (see how John Wells just got the hell out of the way for his successful adaptation of August: Osage County) rather than Boyle, who insists on putting in random weird inserts that add nothing (my "favorite" being a shot of a canted-angle EXIT sign during the first of Fassbender's many tirades on the subject), though it's never too distracting. The cast is strong and adept at wrangling Sorkin's words (even my arch-nemesis Seth Rogen does good work here), and the subject matter is pure Sorkin manna: an unapologetic asshole who knows better than everyone else, surrounded by other well-spoken people who are in his inner circle in part because they are the only ones who can keep up with his verbosity, extols his own virtues and wins the day by being himself and thus better than anyone else. Who cares how true to life this is, it works for the approach! Ridiculous that Sorkin got snubbed for the screenplay, but it's not like they nominated Charlie Wilson's War either, so I guess we shoulda seen it coming. A slight film, but fun all the way through (including the ending-- not sure why it's such a deal-breaker for mfunk, the film had telegraphed it a mile away in its structure and it's as "earned" as anything else in the wrap-up here).

[mfunk9786]

While it apparently was a real exchange between Jobs and his daughter to some extent, there was something grating within the context of the rest of that film (where the dialogue is often much smarter than it has any right to be, which is a big plus in the film's corner) for the line about the iPod to be uttered in such a blunt fashion, followed by a bit of lionizing that comes off almost as a "hey, now that you know the 'twist' coming for Apple, ain't this guy great?" by Boyle. It didn't sit well with me tonally in a film that is otherwise unafraid to portray Jobs as nakedly as it does, and I just think there must've been a wiser or more compelling way to wrap things up than what we got here. It's still an underrated and overlooked film, I'll give you that: I'd nearly forgotten about it already.

[aox]

Besides Idris Elba and Tom Hardy, I feel Michael Fassbinder gave the best performance of the year.

[FrauBlucher]

I agree. When I read he was cast as Steve Jobs I was highly skeptical. But he was outstanding. He did a great job in making me look at the character as the character and not an actor portraying the character, which is a pet peeve I have when it comes to biopics, which is a reason I generally don't like biopics of well known people.

[captveg]

I love the film (just picked up the Blu-ray), but then I like films that choose a less film conventional structure and dive headfirst as this one does with the very live theater-like three acts.

[colinr0380]

Hmmm, it may have been a mistake for me to watch this before The Social Network! Aaron Sorkin is very much a gap in my knowledge but of course he's become a genre in himself now! I do have a question though about all these 'walk and talks': is it normal for them to go in large looping circles in which a couple of characters leave someone behind (in general, but not set in stone it seems 1st part: the 'family', 2nd part Winslet's character, 3rd part the GQ journalist take these roles, at least until the journalist is forcibly kept up there on stage!) and then end up with that same abandoned character just wandering up at the walk and talk's end? Perhaps they're used in this film to emphasise that Jobs is trapped in his backstage area of his upcoming product launch, and no matter how hard other characters (or even Jobs himself at the end) tries to pull himself away, he's always rubber-banding straight back to where he began. Maybe its all a metaphor that the repeated sets of people he runs into turn up to stretch out and pluck Jobs like a harp string!

I don't really know why the half hour to ten minutes (time seems flexible here too. I just knew it was all dreadfully urgent!) before a shareholder's meeting/product launch conference was the best time to sort out a child's alimony payments or tuition fees though! I know this is to make Jobs into a heartless monster, but really it just made the other characters seem worse for throwing irrelevant stuff at someone just before going out on stage to give a presentation! That is at its worst in the second launch section, where all of these people who are not even part of Jobs's company somehow get the chance for heart to hearts, so much that Jeff Daniels' character makes a joke of it at the start of his scene! In a way though I suppose the idea that even having left Apple all of his ex-Apple colleagues keep turning up shows that Job's 'master plan' of the NeXT computer being a big Trojan horse to get his job back at Apple is actually already working! You don't need the product launch at all in some ways, as the backroom deals are already in motion and the newspaper articles already pre-written!

Who cares if the computer is fatally flawed in practical terms? Its just a stepping stone to the next one, seemingly quite literally in NeXT's case! Like a microcosm of business itself, every computer here is vitally important (up there with the end of Second World War apparently! The absolute sincerity in that statement is the most terrifying aspect of it) in that era, and completely unimportant, irrelevant and forgotten the next. Perhaps that is why we never see the actual product launches themselves - they're the end, rather than the beginning, of the journey for Jobs. Whether the computer actually practically works out there in the 'real world' is utterly irrelevant. This is where the Wozniak requests for 'the Apple II team to be acknowledged' come into play as its not just that its irrelevant to Jobs but it seems actively antagonistic to Jobs's view of the world - you don't keep supporting a product after its launch and allow it to develop or last for years or even decades; you make a whole new product with a beautiful new box that you sell at a premium price and makes every other piece of Apple technology that you own immediately obsolete! Or at least so last year, Grandad! That's kind of a monstrous point of view, and a blinkered one towards seeing the value that your customers/consumers can maybe bring to your products, but its sort of the ultimate form of a business-centric worldview. Use something for its one defined purpose, make a big splash and the most amount of money, then kill it and let's move on to the next big thing. Innovation over iteration. Or maybe both over simple tech support!

There's also what seems to be an interesting throughline on the marketing angle in the film too, from 'cinematic' adverts directed by Ridley Scott (which causes its own problems with its skinhead extras!), through (soon to be obsolete!) magazine journalists doing articles, to on stage presentations with the CEO doing the product unveiling himself. Its a narrowing down of the message to control its content in another kind of way. Cut out the artistic or intrusive middle man with their own ideas or agendas and tell the people direct what to be excited for! But don't blow it by making the next Newton!

And that itself seems to be contrasting with the way that Jobs is getting more and more involved with his products as a 'concept' rather than anything particularly physical. The 'happy face' of the Macintosh replaced by the blank black monolith of the NeXT (with literally nothing behind the facade, which fits for the 1988 section being the most business-like and 'professional' of the three eras, contrasting against the messy youthfulness of 1984 and the "Hey, dudes", intensely relaxed poloneck jumper and jeans combo of 1998) and then the translucent glowing alien brain-like shell of the iMac in 1998. Everything is moving towards the product becoming "a figment of other people's imagination" as Brasseye would later put it!

Its difficult to judge this film as I get a sense of ambivalence here towards the main character (though I guess a lot of it comes down to domino's earlier comment about this kind of character being "pure Sorkin manna"), especially in the way that everyone around him aside from Wozniak and arguably John Sulley (so, the other CEO figure! I wonder what a Sorkin version of Atlas Shrugged would have been like?) is in a subordinate role, both enablers and pushy at the same time, presumably because they're the ones whose commitment is a bit more to their jobs being on the line if the launch doesn't go smoothly than any particular, changeable with the weather, company philosophy! The 'little people' are the more unstable ones, timidly watching these grand figures striding about. And there are crowds of them at the end, surrounding like impassive zombies (or rather nascent Apple Store employees as Danny Boyle more tactfully puts it in his commentary!), nervous and slightly embarrassed at witnessing these clashing Titans facing off in their midst, averting their gaze lest they be turned to stone! Or alternately the impertinent ones are stridently demanding stuff, and not decent enough to be content when their demands are met, and even exceeded!

Jobs feels kind of the villain, but the end results of his tenacity is more important than the people he's wading through or using in order to get there. His one moment of 'human weakness' (and perhaps tellingly, the one thing that we never get any flashbacks to in order to let us make up an opinion on. All of the superimpositions of Skylab or Dylan lyrics come from Jobs' rhetoric, as if his verbal skills are taking a physical form to overwhelm the other person. Later on in 1998 there are actual photographs of 'great thinkers' to overwhelm people with, as if Jobs has somehow literalised the rhetoric into physical artefacts!) is having a child and a failed relationship. Its his major stumbling block to an ordered life, and the thing that keeps coming back and needling him, or at least distracting him, in various ways.

But, after all those previous launches that involve a certain amount of faked on-stage trickery and audience manipulation into getting a computer to say hello, or launching a computer without an OS, or computers without any way for a consumer to get inside and tinker with them (literally creating cold and impenetrable objects without a heart, a voice, any memory or even any brain!), the daughter finally does have a use. She is the first 'user' to get through to the showman marketeer - she uses MacPaint to create...something. And of course in the blunt iPod prefiguring ending Jobs, despite composing it into wanting to get rid of the Walkman for something smaller, talks to Lisa about the actual content of the Walkman too. The music which the box will carry is the most important thing rather than the box itself, just as the proprietary MacPaint program shouldn't be the whole story, it should be the facilitator for the content that is enabled to be produced by it.

I'm still not entirely sure if I should be celebrating a film which seems to be elevating shareholder's conferences into the forum for drama of the highest sort though! That's a little scary!

[Trees]

It's no surprise that Fassbender nailed the acting. He's probably the best male actor right now.

I think the main problem holding back this film is its structure. The structure, as some have pointed out here, causes certain scenes to feel contrived, rushed or rigged in places. Because they have pegged the entire film around three specific moments, it causes strange pacing and structural problems, like trying to cram the custody issue into tiny blocks of time right before major, pivotal technology launch events. A more fluid or omniscient structure would have allowed for a more nuanced and wide-ranging view of this man's life.

[colinr0380]

It did seem strange that all the supporting female characters are the ones urgently saying "we've got to get going" or "ten minutes!" (practical facilitating figures actually doing stuff, if only ironing a shirt), while the guys are engaged in their serious clashes together that take as long as they are going to take and are allowed to play out fully, or at least are only intercut with past arguments they had together that add context rather than undermining it! (It perhaps makes sense then that Joanna finally gets through to Steve in the scene where she does the same brooking no argument "Fix it!" thing to him that he had done to Andy about the computer saying hello back in 1984, suggesting that Steve only understands coercion until he gets his own way) The exception arguably being Chrisann and Lisa, though their scenes are constantly being interrupted and curtailed. I think it is most interesting that the scenes of Jobs continually escaping and returning to Chrisann in the 1984 section, perhaps trying to build up strength to re-encounter her again and ending with a door being closed on the matter, are kind of mirrored by Lisa continually trying to escape from him at the end of the 1998 section. It all comes down to who is in control of the 'walk and talks' I suppose!

[knives]

I think I'll side with Dom on the ending of this one if just because the film was softening Jobs starting with the Next launch which does a lot to humanize his relationships with Lisa and Sculley. Perhaps I would have liked to see Boyle and Sorkin keep up the venom of the '84 launch, but that would probably be too exhausting so it doesn't seem to be a bad thing that they went in this direction. For a small thing I haven't seen brought up, but how great was Michael Stuhlbarg in this. Fassbender obviously absorbs the entire film practically leaving it as a one man show, but in terms of the support in light of that I thought he actually did a better job then above the title Rogen (who was good). He genuinely looks the part of a computer engineer from the '70s aging rather naturally and the use of the character gives a lot to play around with on Stuhlbarg's part. His bit at the end also was the most effectively delivered of the four conversations bringing back rather organically the villain Jobs from the first launch while balancing with the more complex Jobs that has developed since.

[colinr0380]

That's a very interesting point. Stuhlbarg has perhaps the most complex of the supporting characters as Andy Hertzfeld, though perhaps the way that Jobs cannot seem to definitively reduce or 'figure out' Hertzfeld is why that character comes across as slightly opaque. Compared to Wozniak with his single issue demand or Sulley's corporate agenda friend-turned-foe and back characters Hertzfeld seems to be the one continually throwing Jobs for a loop as certain revelations arise about what he's been doing (or not been able to do!) behind Jobs' back. He is perhaps the character most affected by the time jumps too, as he is just outside of the circle enough to have been going through his own arc outside of Jobs' gaze, then have to be 'dealt with' every time Jobs notices what's been happening.

He's also interesting as the character more in Chrisann's camp (so already viewed with suspicion!) and seen as a bit of an intruder into his personal life for that by Jobs. But compared to Chrisann's overly-emotional and neurotic, ever shifting, suggested to be selfish and paranoid, shrill demands for money, Andy is presented more as a somewhat more stable to argue with. I think its also interesting that his character arc involves moving from struggling specifically with computer issues to being almost entirely outside of the computer world in 1998, with the argument there around his paying for Lisa's tuition. Andy's done what should have been Steve's 'arc' of techie to family man! Though I like that for as much as he seems to wish to be an intercessor, he still fails to 'win' his verbal jousts as Jobs can (as with Chrisann) just pull rank or get out his cheque book and outbid him!

I wonder if that strengthens Andy's role as the 'conscience' figure, perhaps more than Joanna, though? While Joanna is, perhaps as an employee, stuck in trying to appeal to Steve (at least until her own final "fix it!" scene), Andy's doing things that Steve should have done himself but hasn't, and which then forces him to deal with.

[movielocke]

I was actually planning on finally getting an Iphone til I saw this movie. I had finally broken down and gotten an iPad, but then saw this and decided I didn't really want an iPhone after all.

Sorkin wrote a good script, performances are good and the directing is good. It is really designed to be a big hit play, though, a venue where this material would really shine.


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