It’s life’s illusions
I recall.
I really don’t know life at all.
I really don’t know life at all.
—Joni Mitchell, “Both Sides Now,” 1969, Joni Mitchell - Both Sides,
Now [Original Studio Version ... YouTube (4:30)
Who knew Bob Dylan was a driving force behind the
popularization of the computer on the Internet? But if you watch this film Dylan and Steve
Jobs are interconnected forces striving for social change. Michael Fassbender may have been saner
wearing a cartoon, papier-mâché head in 2014
Top Ten List #10 Frank , a film where music literally masks his mad
obsessions and personal psychoses. But
as Steve Jobs, the overcontrolling, egomaniacal force behind an as yet
undiscovered corporate product, demanding all the credit himself, though it
remains unclear what it is exactly that he does do other than tyrannically
browbeat everyone associated with his product while viciously undermining and demeaning
the efforts of all others involved, placing himself center stage in his own
Barnum & Bailey circus act, billed as “the greatest show on earth,” where
he’s certain his innovations will revolutionize the way the world
operates. Who, other than himself, knew
this would actually happen? Curiously,
as written by Aaron Sorkin, adapting Walter Isaacson’s book by the same name in
2011 (released 19 days after Jobs’ death), the film contrasts his enormous
ambition with this swelled notion of what he would become, accentuating the
abysmal failures of his first two product launchings, the first Macintosh
computer in 1984 and the neXT “black cube” in 1988, not exactly humbling experiences,
where the film is made up of the real time moments immediately preceding Jobs
taking the stage before an anxiously anticipatory public, before finally
realizing all his dreams with the release of desktop iMac in 1998, each section
shot differently on 16 mm, 35 mm, and high definition digital. One of the more startling reactions after seeing
this film is: who the hell is Joanna
Hoffmann (played astonishingly by Kate Winslet, who has to be among the
frontrunners for Best Supporting Actress)?
She deserves a medal for simply putting up with this man all these years
(and did apparently two years in a row at Apple in 1981 and 1982 when a
satirical award was given to her as “the person who did the best job of
standing up to” the boss), showing such an alarming degree of patience and professional
reserve as his world class marketing executive, where she is the only other
person in the room who has any idea how his mind works and feeds off it
constantly while making sure all the meticulous preparations before the
momentous events are in place.
While not nearly the triumph of Aaron Sorkin’s earlier, more
incisively written portrait of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in David
Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), which felt more like a quick-witted, highly
inventive film instead of a more standard biographical approach, part of the
problem is the structure itself, as it is entirely comprised of smaller, behind-the
scenes moments, and while often humorous and cleverly written, it does offer an
opportunity to view Jobs in connection to the world around him, where he is
continually portrayed as an overbearing, arrogantly pompous ringleader
continually driving his own personal ambitions above all else, it also
resembles similar territory explored by the Coen brothers in Inside
Llewyn Davis (2012), taking particular interest in focusing upon a subject
“prior to” a major cultural shift that changed the nation. In each the center of attention happens to be
a particularly loathsome individual whose damaging flaws potentially undermine their own creative ingenuity, yet in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs is described
as the “creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive
revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music,
phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.” Almost lost is the fact that by the time the
film begins, Jobs and his computer whiz high school friend Steve Wozniak (Seth
Rogan) have already made millions by co-founding Apple in 1976, with Wozniak
designing the products while Jobs was the clever snake oil salesman who pitched
the first mass-produced personal computers, Apple I and Apple II, as
the new wave of the future. With the
idea of breaking away on his own, the film suggests his competitive mean streak
of denouncing those that helped him get where he is today is all part of his personally
conniving yet sophisticated sales pitch to promote new ideas that have yet to
be realized, but only because technology has not advanced that far yet,
continually lagging behind the creative process, which is how Jobs distances
himself from his old friend Wozniak, as despite the technological advances in
leaps and bounds, it simply can’t keep up.
Despite all the ballyhooed hype surrounding his product,
holding others to a standard of perfection that he can’t remotely match
himself, this film is like pulling back the curtain and exposing the wizard in
THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), where he’s revealed to be just a man. In each case it’s quite a shock to the
audience inevitably preferring all the razzle dazzle to the ordinariness of
real life. While Jobs is worth hundreds
of millions of dollars, his ex-girlfriend and high school sweetheart Chrisann
(Katherine Waterston) is forced to beg for money, literally going on welfare
for his thoughtless refusal to pay child support for his out of wedlock child,
where the man is humbled in so many ways (though without ever realizing it) by
the sheer force of good will that comes from his daughter Lisa, who he refuses
to recognize. “I’m not your father,” he
says on several occasions in front of Lisa, played by Makenzie Moss when she
first hears it at the age of five. Perhaps
unintentionally, the smaller story about Lisa (played by three different
actresses), who is present in each of the three launches depicted, is a much
more compelling portrait than the larger surrounding drama of Jobs himself,
despite another Herculean effort by Michael Fassbender, as she is the lesser
developed but more vitally interesting subject in each instance as compared to
the more ego-driven, madly out-of-control Frankenstein invention that is Jobs, where
his human shortcomings are at the center of the picture, highlighted by his
ongoing difficulties in taking a larger role in her life, where she turns out
to be his Achilles heel. Lisa actually
has verve and personality and a burning desire to be loved and appreciated,
while Jobs allows her to play with a now outdated interactive computer named
after her called the Apple Lisa which she uses to impressively draw a picture,
which remains one of the poignant moments of his entire life. It is only after this minor victory, his
invention succeeding with his own daughter while failing miserably on the
technical front, with his latest design unable to say “Hello,” as advertised,
where Jobs agrees to pay Chrisann whatever she needs. Simultaneous to this little unplanned family
visit, we’re witness to an overbearing Jobs bulling and browbeating his entire
team with unreachable expectations, but no one worse than software architect
Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) who can’t magically make it all happen,
eventually implementing a plan of deception to fool the audience into believing
that it works, even when it doesn’t.
Jobs rationalizes this sleight of hand is not really an ethics
violation, convinced that by the time the product is released, “it will
work.”
After a long, drawn-out power struggle, Jobs is booted out
of Apple the next year in 1985 under mysterious circumstances, where an
obviously offended Jobs claims he was fired, while CEO John Sculley (Jeff
Daniels), one of Jobs’ strongest supporters, has a different interpretation
that we only learn later. Once more, the
next launch four years later is a computer touted as an educational product,
even as it’s priced out of the reach of most colleges, which, of course, doesn’t
work either, as the machine simply doesn’t perform yet what it’s designed to
do, leaving Jobs in a precarious position as he’s about to introduce it before
a filled-to-capacity opera house lined with voraciously interested teachers and
students who believe in the hype. Nonetheless,
he’s in surprising good spirits, having brought over an entire team from Apple
to help him with this new design, where Lisa is now nine (played by Ripley
Sobo), mysteriously pulled out of school for the occasion where she’s seen wearing
Walkman headphones. Asked what she’s listening
to, she indicates “Both Sides Now,” a “really old” Joni Mitchell song where her
father can, surprisingly, recite the lyrics, where suddenly he doesn’t seem so
distant, but only for the moment, as he rather infamously has it out with a
highly perturbed Steve Wozniak who is himself being pushed out of the Jobs
inner circle, labeled a betrayer who helped push Jobs out, where the two engage
in a dysfunctional family drama hurling incendiary verbal barbs at one another
in front of friends, coworkers and the press, where rumors are swirling suggesting
Jobs may actually be back as the head of Apple, which has reached economic
stagnation. Still, Jobs is utterly
speechless when his emotionally torn daughter gives him a big hug before she
leaves, indicating “I want to live with you.”
Rather than the happy family reunion that some might have preferred,
Jobs never really gave the idea a thought, instead he is emphatically anointed
as the “chosen one,” returning as the CEO of a company on the verge of
bankruptcy, needing the brilliance of his ideas to reshape and envision the
future, where there is a clever use of flashback sequences to reimagine how it
all began when they were long-haired kids hanging out in the garage, but now Jobs
was more than happy to fill the bill, going on an unprecedented run of
successes that are only hinted at in the film, like the iMac, iTunes, Apple
Stores, the iPod,
the iTunes
Store, the iPhone,
the App Store, and the iPad. Still, he’s on the receiving end of an
obviously angry tirade from his now 19-year old daughter (Perla Haney-Jardine)
who has finally learned to reject him as the deadbeat dad he always was, but ever
the consummate salesman, he promises to find a way to “put five hundred or a
thousand songs in your pocket.” finally admitting that “I’m poorly made,” as if
he’s little more than one of his own machines, luring her back into his good
graces as he hears the thunderous sounds of the applause awaiting him as he magnanimously
steps onto the stage into the resounding acclaim of the flashbulbs and bright
lights, finally earning the adoration of a fickle public.
