“You’ll have to tell us how you did it:” the bloated prestige of Steve Jobs
It’s strange to me that some biopics take decades to arrive on the screen, while others take only a matter of months.
Selma (2015, Ava Duvernay) was the first major studio film about Martin Luther King, Jr., arguably the most crucial American public figure of the twentieth century, and it came out more than fifty years after the March on Washington. It took just as long for there to be movies about Bob Dylan and Alan Turing; we still don’t have one on Albert Einstein.
Yet Steve Jobs was released just four years after the death of its subject. Why? Because Mr. Jobs didn’t fight for unpopular political change, nor did he develop complicated scientific theories, nor was he the most provocative lyrical poet in American history.
He was merely a visionary, and a hustler. And that speaks to Hollywood.
I found Steve Jobs uninteresting when I first watched it seven years ago, and I find it uninteresting now. I’ve read critiques that Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay is too stagey, or theatrical — but I don’t think theatricality is necessarily a bad thing in movies. Elia Kazan and Mike Nichols made scintillating visual dramas out of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (‘66), respectively, and those films relied on scripts that made no significant changes from the plays on which they were based.
Steve Jobs was never a play, and I think it would be just as uninteresting if presented on a stage. My problem with Sorkin’s writing is that it is determined to frame Jobs as a hero, or to trace his trajectory as heroic. Certainly, that was the self-aggrandizing perspective that the man was famous for while he was alive — but I believe that true heroism requires some degree of humility, or selflessness.
This screenplay fails to find anything in Jobs’ story that renders it remotely cathartic. The reason Sorkin’s depiction of Mark Zuckerberg works in The Social Network (‘10) is because he frames the creator of Facebook, successful though he may be, as a tragic figure: college-student-creates-the-largest-social-network-in-history-and-loses-all-his-friends-in-the-process.
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, packs its protagonist (played by Michael Fassbender) with flaws — yet none of those flaws are tragic. It doesn’t matter that Jobs is a crap father, on bad terms with John Scully (Jeff Daniels), threatens Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), or insults Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen). These flaws don’t matter because Jobs doesn’t suffer for them. He walks away with everything in the end: old friends, profits, and his girl, Lisa (Perla Haney-Jardine).
He’s a dick and he wins it all. He gets to trash the cake and eat it, too.
Danny Boyle’s direction doesn’t do anything to improve or sharpen Sorkin’s rambling; his camera seems to be following the actors around, which is strange since it was so widely reported that his cast had three weeks of rehearsal before filming. A script that places such heavy emphasis on dialogue needs a disciplined visual-editorial approach to match; despite using different film stocks to parallel evolving historical eras, Boyle fails to provide Steve Jobs with an incisive eye or ear.
(It’s a useful contrast to consider: David Fincher, an obsessive technician, brought the same focus to mise-en-scene in The Social Network that Sorkin brought to that film’s language. Danny Boyle is a far more impressionistic, whimsical stylist — his relationship to imagery is too impulsive and idiosyncratic for Sorkin’s classical tone.)
The performances here are dutifully good, nothing out of the ordinary for anyone involved. I think that Steve Jobs is a strong example of how swiftly the label of “prestige” can isolate a subject from its proper artistic realization. All of show business was desperate to get their hands on Mr. Jobs’ life story, even before he was dead. And in the race for that ownership, no one paused long enough to seriously ask whether or not the team that was being assembled was right for the job.
Indeed, was the job even necessary? Or did it just seem necessary because one man told us it was?
