Last updated on June 22, 2014
Please don’t flay me, I haven’t read the Steve Jobs biography yet, although I know several people who are quite familiar with it! That’s the context of this review, along with bits and pieces of information I gleaned from people who read it and the WIkipedia page. I have intentionally NOT looked up all the information just to give a proper evaluation of the film itself and its attempt to provide me with a glimpse into the life of Steve Jobs.
So Jobs is an entertaining and failed attempt at a biopic of Apple’s leading man. I say “entertaining” because the film will hold your interest if you have even a smidgen of interest in the subject matter, while I say “failed” because the script just doesn’t know how to make a good story out of Jobs’ life. Biographies often turn into a route genre exercise where the main character, whoever he/she may be, immediately turns into the “hero” of the story, regardless of how many bad things they did in real life. See: why there’s no Hitler biographical film coming out any time soon – how do you focus on a thoroughly real historical person? It’s one thing to make a fictional character whom the audience isn’t supposed to like work, but a real person? Forget it! And Steve Jobs, from what I hear and see, wasn’t exactly the greatest guy to know from a purely social standpoint.
Jobs, in that sense, tries to deal with people who like Jobs’ dedication to the job (this was a completely unintentional pun) versus people who simply hate the guy for being terrible at any and all social situations, beneficial or not. Part of this comes from the fact that Steve Jobs seems like an entirely unlikable person, and Ashton Kutcher IS a likable person. I would call it a poor casting call, but I honestly don’t think he played the part poorly. Rather, how does one relay the personality of a protagonist 1. that you can’t relate to in any meaningful way 2. who is also a terrible, terrible person on many levels except for his quality products and feats of design? Kutcher landed an impossible role that could never truly make anyone, anywhere happy, whether Apple haters or fanatics. At least the supporting cast help buttress the film through creating some humorous moments in a sea of “I AM A GENIUS” sorta dialogue.
Additionally, a biopic takes elements of a real life and weaves them into an interesting tale – after all, that’s why we watch them, right? In our case here, the writers honestly didn’t know what stuff to put in and what stuff to put out. Somehow, they make two hours and seven minutes seem entirely too short – we spend FOREVER on internal politics in Apple during the early 1980s, but we equally spend relatively little time on his early life. Further, how does he transition from drug culture to elsewhere? Does he just decide to help Wozniak on a whim? How in the heck does he get married? I’m looking at this from the perspective of the average viewer, and I honestly can’t say the answers would look very clear. Maybe they just wanted to jam as many actual events into the story as possible, but none of them link to the main narrative line in any way. We don’t know anyone in-depth, and it’s hard to care at that point.
Since one character remains of such central focus, you must also make a decision as to which people in the life of the protagonist make up his/her story arc. In real life, I’m sure there’s a million people you meet that will affect you in one way or another, but biopics need to truncate this. Does Jobs actually end up having a kid out of wedlock? Heck, does this movie even make you care? Not really! We don’t care about the woman, nor do we care about any relationships Jobs has. Maybe that was an intentional decision on the part of the directors/writers, but I somehow think not.
When Jobs makes sure that certain founders of Apple get zero stock options, do we feel bad for those people? Not really! And yet, it’s obvious that the movie thinks we should; it just never offers any good reason to focus on anybody but Jobs. Jobs does bad things to people, insults them, and continually badmouths everybody – and then I guess we’re supposed to feel “hey, he’s a bad guy”. Since we’ve got zero investment in these situations, other than in the sense of progressing the plot, it’s hard to muster up any enthusiasm.
Of course, since this film wants to portray him as a flawed genius with no social skills, he “redeems” himself through the wonders of a flashback. He’s married, has kids, we see them for about two minutes, and then he returns to Apple. Frankly, we could do to see some semblance of that transformation…but then again, the writers obviously don’t know how to portray this other than in a rudimentary, history based way. To not take a position on Jobs’ life avoids offending anyone, but it makes for a rather boring film once you’ve seen that they will not make a decision or judgment call on his life.
Now, on the other hand, I honestly enjoyed myself watching the film. None of it felt poorly made, and even Kutcher musters up a rather good performance (and the infamous “nerd walk” too!). If you view the film as a treatise on the symbolic importance of Jobs, and not the man’s relationships, then it works out quite fine. He can suddenly emerge into an inspirational monologue at the end of the movie, and no one will feel cheated. He can abandon people at a whim, or just forget their existence, if we feel his work is important enough to ignore those facets of his life for the majority of the runtime. What you can’t do is try to do both and make Jobs a sympathetic character, and that’s where the film ultimately falters most.
