BEFORE: It's not cheating if I use child actors to link between movies - the right child actors get a LOT of work, and even I may not realize that I'm seeing the same few dozen kids, again and again. I always check these credits, especially if some kid looks familiar and I'm sure I've seen him or her in another film. This time Perla Haney-Jardine carries over from "Untraceable" to play Steve Job's daughter, Lisa, at the age of 19 in one of the time periods covered.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Jobs" (Movie #2,092)
THE PLOT: A portrait of Steve Jobs, at the epicenter of the digital revolution - the story unfolds behind the scenes at three iconic product launches.
AFTER: I wondered why the world needed a SECOND film telling the backstory of Steve Jobs, after that one released in 2013 that starred Ashton Kutcher. Was this just the usual by-product of two Hollywood studios producing similar films, or one ripping off the other? Since this was the second film on the same subject to hit the marketplace, it almost HAD to find a new way of presenting the same biographical information, and for the most part, this one did.
While the first film "Jobs" took a mainly linear-narrative approach to Steve Jobs' life, which I tend to appreciate more, this one set out to concentrate on three similar scenes set at different points in Jobs' career - the unveiling of the original Mac in 1984, the 1988 launch of the NeXT computer, and the 1998 introduction of the iMac, after Jobs returned to Apple Computers following the NeXT disaster. In each time period, Jobs is visited backstage (or in one notable case, on the stage) by the same four people (I think): Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Andy Hertzfeld, and his daughter Lisa (twice accompanied by her mother, and once alone).
It's an innovative format, which at times reminded me of Ebenezer Scrooge being visited by four ghosts (that's right, I said FOUR, Marley totally counts as a ghost) in "A Christmas Carol". But why does everyone seem to visit him backstage, when there's just 10 minutes to go before each presentation starts? Couldn't they have all seen him the day before, or earlier in the morning? Or was this when Steve Jobs took all of his most important meetings, in the minutes before each product launch? I can't take this seriously, it's got to be just a storytelling convention to make things easier for the filmmakers, right? It seems to me to be the height of rudeness to try and conduct business at this point in time, again and again - can you blame Steve Jobs for being pissed off, if everyone keeps bothering him right before he's supposed to go on stage?
Let me try and focus on the positives for a minute, because there is a lot of juicy insightful dramatic material that takes place in these conversations, attempting to give some insight into Steve Jobs' personality, or lack thereof. I didn't know that he was adopted, which (according to this film) seems to have influenced not only his drive to succeed, but also his lack of a connection to his own daughter. While Scully points out the positive points of adoption, that he was selected by his parents, Jobs counters with the information that his first adoptive parents returned him, and his second adoptive parents were involved in a court case to adopt him, so they at first avoided forming a loving bond with him, preparing for the possibility that they would lose the case.
The rest of Jobs' personality, however, we're left to speculate about - Wozniak's character had a great line about how it should be possible for someone to be both a great designer AND not an asshole, but is it? Does a certain amount of ego fuel the drive to succeed, so is it possible that the necessary ego to be great at something also creates an arrogance as a by-product? At the close of the film, Jobs confesses to his daughter that he was "poorly made", so can we infer that his personality flaw is similar to a product's technical flaw, like a lack of a microphone jack or a system board that doesn't allow you to add more RAM? And if so, is being an asshole a hardware problem, rather than a software one? Because you can always add new software, but if there's a design flaw in the hardware, it can't be corrected.
However, and this is a major sticking point for me, the film could not seem to stay within the "three act" time parameters, because it flashed back liberally to other points. So it didn't even seem to follow its own rules - what's the point of saying, "Hey, we're going to focus on JUST these three time periods..." if it doesn't even do that? During the 1984 scenes there are flashbacks to Jobs and Wozniak working on the first Apple computers in that garage, and during the 1988 scenes they flash back to Jobs being fired by John Scully a couple years before, and during the 1998 scenes they flash back to Sculley being first hired by Jobs - so come on, the framework here was just an excuse to jump around through time randomly (more or less) which is that major trend that's hot in Hollywood now that drives me totally berserk.
It's not just that the timeline is fractured, it's what results from pulling this crap, time and again. Toggling between Jobs and Scully arguing in both 1988 AND 1985 at the same time is confusing to say the least, especially when the thing they're arguing about in 1988 is the nature of their argument in 1985, when Jobs got fired. And the reason that we couldn't see these things play out in the correct order is what, exactly? Also, what's the point of flashing back to Scully's hiring during the 1998 scenes - nostalgia? Who gives a crap, when Scully's been fired at that point for promoting the disastrous Newton PDA? So what if he comes to reconcile with Jobs in 1998? Seeing the exact details of the conversation that took place during his hiring adds exactly NOTHING to the 1998 storyline, so why include it?
We already knew from the first film that Jobs failed upward, more or less. The 1984 Mac was apparently a dog of a product (hey, I owned one, I had a lot of fun with it at the time, once someone invented games like "Fool's Errand"...) and the NeXT computer was apparently also a non-starter. But the OS for the NeXT got Jobs hired back at Apple, because once they put the NeXT OS into the Apple hardware, they got an iMac, which was a success. Jobs' (or more probably, the screenwriter's) comparison of his madness-is-the-method design approach to Skylab seems very insightful - when they launched that space station back in the day, they didn't know how they were going to get it back to Earth, but they figured they had some time to work it out. (Umm, they didn't.) Jobs seems to have taken a similar approach by designing computers that people didn't know they needed yet, until he told them that they did. Buy this computer now, so you'll have it when they invent the internet. ("The what?" "Never mind, just buy it...")
While the 2013 film "Jobs" wasn't perfect, either, I think it did some things better, besides just telling a linear narrative story that people don't need timeline charts to understand. Seeing Jobs park in a handicapped spot, again and again, for example, tells us just as much about his personality, if not more, than his argument with Woz over an unwillingness to acknowledge the Apple II team during the Macintosh launch. And BOTH films stopped before mentioning the iPod, iPad and iPhone, which collectively have changed personal technology for nearly everyone. Now before I go, I want to focus for just a minute on the two actors, and their different portrayals of Jobs in the two films.
Neither one is perfect, nor would you expect either one to be, especially if each actor is going to portray Jobs over a long period of time. Again, I think about "A Christmas Carol", in its various incarnations ("Scrooge", "Scrooged", etc.), since in that story we see Ebenezer Scrooge as both an old miser and as a young clerk. Do you cast George C. Scott, for example, as Scrooge and then try to make him look young for the flashbacks, or do you cast Albert Finney (who was 34 in 1970) and then make him look much older for the present-day scenes? There's no one right answer...
But consider this - Kutcher probably had the better accent, because Fassbender still came off as sounding foreign, non-American to me. I know many European actors can pull off an American accent, but he's just not one of them. By the same token, I couldn't believe Kate Winslet's Polish-American accent, either. (What's with all these foreigners taking jobs away from Amurrican actors?) Kutcher also looked better as the young Steve Jobs, but I couldn't buy him as the older one, it seemed very fakey. Fassbender, on the other hand, seemed more like a visual dead ringer for Jobs in the 1998 scenes, but in the sequences set earlier, he just looked like a young Fassbender, not evoking the character at all.
So, here's what I propose, and I think this could work - someone needs to make a fan edit of the first 2/3 of "Jobs", with Kutcher playing in the more narrative vein, right up until the timeline hits 1998, and then we cut to Fassbender as the older version, for the last 1/3 of "Steve Jobs", only we cut out the unnecessary flashback. I realize this wouldn't be perfect - for one thing, you'd have two different actors playing Wozniak (Josh Gad turns into Seth Rogen) and Sculley (Matthew Modine turns into Jeff Daniels), but for minor characters like Steve's daughter, it could work, since you wouldn't expect her to look the same at age 19 than she did at, say, 12. How about it? If I have time at home I may give this a try, since I've now got both films on the same disc.
NITPICK POINT: To drive the point home, the three different time periods here were apparently filmed on 16mm, 35mm and digital formats to illustrate the changes in technology over time. Great trick, only I didn't notice any difference in the look of the film over the course of the film. So that seems like a bit of wasted effort.
Also starring Michael Fassbender (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Kate Winslet (last seen in "Triple 9"), Seth Rogen (last seen in "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope"), Jeff Daniels (last seen in "101 Dalmatians"), Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "Body of Lies"), Katherine Waterston (last seen in "Sleeping With Other People"), Ripley Sobo (last seen in "Ricki and the Flash"), Makenzie Moss, John Ortiz (last seen in "Blackhat"), Sarah Snook, John Steen, Adam Shapiro (last seen in "Not Fade Away"), Stan Roth, Steven Wiig (last seen in "Into the Wild") with archive footage of Bob Dylan (last seen in "Masked and Anonymous"), John Lennon, Pablo Picasso.
RATING: 5 out of 10 floppy disks
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