Directrospective: STEVE JOBS (2015)
Notes on the films of English director and central Smurfs antagonist Danny Boyle.
We may never know what attracted Aaron Sorkin, the superstar playwright, showrunner, and screenwriter known only slightly more for his smugly self-impressed dialogue than for his addiction struggles and disastrous personal life, who notoriously gave himself sole writing credit on nearly every episode of the The West Wing he touched, who shared the series’s sole writing Emmy win for the episode “In Excelsis Deo,” about the death of a homeless Korean War vet, but took all the acceptance speech time for himself and left none for co-writer Rick Cleveland, son of a Korean War vet who died homeless, who left The West Wing after the fourth season due to some murky internal conflict only for the show to maintain decent ratings and plenty of awards recognition for its remaining three seasons, and whose highly publicized West Wing follow-up Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was lambasted by critics and ignored by viewers, to the story of Steve Jobs. What could Sorkin have found worth exploring in the story of a world-famous workaholic narcissist tech mogul with a strained relationship with his daughter, who got pushed out of his own company for being a stubborn prick only to watch it do just fine without him, whose next venture was a legendary failure, who was seen and saw himself as the genius idea man when his real contribution was mostly curation and the taking of credit for the work of others? It’s just one of those mysteries.
To be fair, Sorkin had been hired for the gig soon after Sony acquired the rights to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, Steve Jobs. He was a logical choice based on career alone, having recently won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for another prestige true Silicon Valley story, David Fincher’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK. That film is probably Sorkin’s best and least obnoxious work, due to its organically putting the screenwriter’s smug, showy monologues mostly into the mouths of people we’re supposed to dislike anyway. But where that film was a scathing dismantling of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a petty, vindictive schmuck (a depiction compared to which the real-life Zuckerberg looks more and more like an outsized caricature), Jobs was a widely esteemed figure. The public had largely decided his was the kind of “genius” that grants you a pass for being a prick and treating everyone else like an idiot. Jobs was the kind of “genius” that Sorkin clearly thought himself to be, even if the public only sometimes agreed with him.
I have not read Isaacson’s book. I find hero worship of tech industry types about as unpalatable as I find huge biographies of History’s Great Men. I cannot speak to its specific angle on Jobs, but I do know that Jobs himself commissioned Isaacson to write it in 2004, when Isaacson had already published two works of biography, one on Benjamin Franklin and one on Henry Kissinger. He was in the middle of a third, on Albert Einstein. These were the qualifications that Jobs thought made Isaacson the right person for the task. The finished book was finally published in October 2011, only a few weeks after Jobs’s death at 56 from pancreatic cancer for which he largely sought alternative medical treatments, and became an acclaimed bestseller. Doesn’t sound to me like Steve Jobs is much of a hatchet job. Sorkin adaptation takes its liberties, but where his Zuckerberg is an all-out villain with a little tragedy to him, his Jobs is a complicated flawed figure of great humanity.
Initially, SOCIAL NETWORK director Fincher signed on to direct Sorkin’s script with Christian Bale in the title role. Fincher’s cold harshness and Bale’s inherent spikiness suggest that this version might have been appropriately damning, but we’ll never know. Fincher and Bale dropped out and Danny Boyle stepped in, originally hoping to reteam with Leonardo DiCaprio for the first time since THE BEACH. Like the Fincher/Bale version, we can only speculate as to what a DiCaprio-starring STEVE JOBS would be like, but I can’t imagine his boyish smarm would make a good fit. He also doesn’t look anything like the guy. Bale came back, then dropped out again, and Boyle eventually settled on Michael Fassbender, who was at one point in discussions for the role in TRANCE that went to Vincent Cassel. He’s a much closer lookalike to Jobs, to my eyes, and has a mix of charm and prickish superiority that works well.
The result is among Boyle’s least Boyley films. Sorkin wisely anchors the story on three specific moments in Jobs’s career, each a flurry of backstage conflict before the respective launches of the Apple Macintosh, the failed NeXT personal computer, and the iMac. Across a period of fourteen years we watch Jobs frustrate and gaslight and walk all over his colleagues like Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (a never-better Seth Rogen), Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), software engineer Andy Hertzfeldt (Michael Stuhlbarg), and marketing exec and Jobs confidant, Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet with a Polish accent that wanders away and then comes back stronger). We also see the extraordinarily wealthy Jobs continually refuse to pay adequate child support to his ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) because he won’t acknowledge his paternity of their daughter, Lisa (played at three different ages by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and KILL BILL VOL. 2’s Perla Haney-Jardine). While events play out all over the green rooms and hallways and catwalks of the various event venues, it’s a distinctly stagey movie. Most of the major events of Jobs’s life we hear about have taken place offscreen. We don’t even see the actual launch presentations - Sorkin is highly focused, in a playwright’s way, on the high emotional tension that precedes the more potentially cinematic stuff. His theater and television roots are in control here.
This is not to say that the film is uncinematic. It’s beautifully photographed by Alwin H. Küchler, who’d last worked with Boyle on SUNSHINE, unsurprisingly the film in Boyle’s career to which this one bears the most visual resemblance. They distinguish each act with a different film format, 16mm for 1984’s Macintosh launch, 35mm for 1988’s NeXT unveiling, and digital cinematography for the 1998 launch of the iMac. Their framing is inventive and the sets dynamic. All the pains Boyle takes to keep STEVE JOBS from feeling like a filmed play are there onscreen, and it’s an engaging watch. But for a movie by a filmmaker with such a defined aesthetic flavor and texture, the biggest and showiest moves here are at the script level. The film would make a much more comfortable double feature with Sorkin’s sole directorial outing to date, the very pleasurably self-congratulatory MOLLY’S GAME, than with Boyle’s other geographically constrained film, 127 HOURS.
Where Sorkin’s fingerprints are even clearer is in the emotional and thematic through-line of the film. Boyle’s regular theme of self-interest is a big part the story, as is its frequent narrative manifestation in Jobs’s resistance to giving Chrisann and Lisa any money. For Sorkin, though, the story of Steve Jobs is one of a driven, fastidious guy whose condescension, callousness and narcissism are hurtful to the people around him, but they love him anyway and in the end he turns out to be right. As far as I can tell, what Jobs brought to the table at Apple was an uncanny eye for detail in the results of others’ hard work. The people who worked with and for him, often under intense stress and impossible expectations, only received his gratitude or even acknowledgement when to do so would suit him. His daughter Lisa earns his appreciation only when she offers a perfect demonstration of the Macintosh’s ease of use. In his long-overdue apology for denying his obligation to her and nearly allowing her dismissal from Harvard due to unpaid tuition (fucking come ON, dude), he concedes to her that he is “poorly made.” The most honest expression of regret he can give her is that he wouldn’t be such an asshole if he’d been designed by someone as great as he is. It’s not terribly difficult to imagine Sorkin telling his own daughter that he wouldn’t have been so unavailable, or made her feel so unimportant, or said something so hurtful, if he’d been allowed to script it all out beforehand.