Steve Jobs

Maybe there’s something vain about making three Steve Jobs movies in two years. In fact, this over-saturation is in keeping with the man himself. According to the new film, Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle, the pugnacious CEO of Apple Computers esteemed himself higher than anyone else. When we meet him in 1984, he’s about to unveil his latest gadget: the Mackintosh computer. In 1984, Apple products looked like every other clunky, ugly device (vaguely futuristic in the way of 2001: A Space Odyssey), and this may be the filmmakers’ greatest joke on a company known for its beautiful electronics. Sure, they’re beautiful now. But Steve Jobs never makes it past 1998, and the original iMac is so ugly that Lisa Jobs (Steve’s daughter) quips, “It looks like Judy Jetson’s EasyBake Oven.”

If we have to sit through another movie about this arrogant bastard—whose company created a lot of amazing devices that I love—at least we get a somewhat unconventional movie, with some truly good performances. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin structures the film like a three-act play, not a traditional biopic. Every time I sit down in front of one of those biographical dramas—even a good one—a little part of me dies of boredom. I went in expecting that same tired formula: Steve Jobs the kid who couldn’t relate to the other, normal children, Steve Jobs the kid who couldn’t resist taking things apart and putting them back together, Steve Jobs the smartest, ballsiest guy in the room. Then we would eventually get to Jobs's fall from grace and resurrection, the most interesting parts of his career. The structure frees director Danny Boyle, too. He doesn't have to honor the constraints of a traditional bio. What we have here is a stripped down drama that puts its actors under the microscope to see what they can do. It's immensely entertaining. 

Aaron Sorkin treats us to a highly concentrated airing of grievances, where we learn how justified was our disdain for Steve Jobs (but please, take more of my money!), but where we also learn that Steve Jobs was a human being. Michael Fassbender, the automaton of Great Acting, turns in a surprisingly lively and funny performance as the Master himself. Fassbender doesn’t chew up the scenery; He approaches this character as a flawed human being, and he controls our need to hate him with precision. By the end, that hatred has simmered to mild dislike with a touch of fondness.

Like The Social Network, Steve Jobs has a weight to it that feels slightly out of proportion with its subject matter. I think that’s because we still don’t fully understand how radically these technological gurus have reshaped our culture. And, perhaps, these two men in particular won’t be the ones we remember one hundred years from now. (It seems especially likely with Zuckerburg, as teenagers increasingly abandon the Facebook ship for other hipper social media sites.) But these movies put their fingers on the culture in an interesting and bold way: They force us to confront the reality that we’ve given our lives over to companies run by men who aren’t always very good human beings. And yet, these men are more human—not less—by the end.

Kate Winslet, who plays Steve Jobs’s right hand, Joanna Hoffman, gives an equally strong performance. Hoffman seems always trying to save Jobs from himself. In the many instances when Jobs deliberately shatters the relationship between himself and any number of his coterie, it’s Joanna who’s desperately picking up the pieces, who’s appealing to a version of Steve Jobs that she loves and respects. It’s through her that we feel any connection to Jobs at all. Winslet’s best accomplishment in this film is that she makes Joanna strong and appealing, not weak and slovenly. You feel that she could walk away at any moment, but chooses loyalty.

The electric force of the drama in this movie is reason enough to see it. I think that’s why Sorkin opted not to give us the grand sweep of this man’s life. A grand narrative would have deified him and taken all the excitement out of the story. This movie shows Steve Jobs—as far as I can tell—as he was: arrogant, myopic, cowardly, brazen, sharp, funny, and flawed. 

With Seth Rogen (as Steve Wozniak, Jobs’s partner and the man who did much of the brain-work of Apple), Jeff Daniels, Katherine Waterston (as Steve’s troubled girlfriend), Michael Stuhlberg, and playing Lisa Jobs at different ages, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Mackenzie Moss. 

Sunshine

Sunshine (2007). Danny Boyle’s ode to Alien and any number of other science fiction films is an effective and grim enterprise. It’s set in the near-future, when the sun is dying and life on earth hangs in jeopardy. Several years before the movie takes place, a spacecraft, the Icarus, was sent to blast a payload of nukes into the sun to try and revitalize it. That craft and her crew have not been heard from since, and now a new team must repeat the journey aboard the Icarus II. Only this time, there can be no mistakes. The payload aboard the Icarus II is the last of its kind, apparently due to the earth’s depleting resources. The crew should have known better than to name either one of their space ships after the boy who flew too close to the sun and then died. But Boyle of course cannot resist such an allusion, and we are filled with grim expectation as the movie pounds away, and bad situation after bad situation confronts the characters. We are filled with the stark realization that no good is going to come of this. As grim as Alien’s plot is, I always have a good time watching it, perhaps because I know that the entire survival of the planet isn’t at stake. But Sunshine, like too many films of late, must experience conflict on only the grandest of scales. In the last third of the movie, Boyle introduces a particularly strange (and none too well explained) plot element involving a possibly supernatural presence on board the ship, and at that point I stopped caring entirely. The performances, however, are convincing. The cast includes Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, Michelle Yeoh, Troy Garity, Cliff Curtis, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Benedict Wong.

Trance

Danny Boyle's Trance is like Inception meets Headhunters (the Norwegian film about a professional art thief who steals a priceless painting from a professional killer). In it, an art auctioneer (James McAvoy) tries to double-cross his partners during a heist, and winds up in the hospital after being hit hard on the head. When he wakes up he can't remember what he did with the painting (a Rembrandt, no less), and his partners-in-crime are furious and ready to kill him. He goes to a professional hypnotist (Rosario Dawson) to try and recover his memory and retrieve the painting. But that's only the beginning. What unfolds is a perplexing labyrinth of "who's playing whom?" type games.

You will likely find yourself being pulled into this murky yet lithe, enticing thriller against your will. The script by Joe Ahearne and John Hodge thrives on keeping the audience in the dark, and Boyle doesn't seem to mind this a bit: we're never able to trust where it's all going, and much of the plot seems unnecessary except that we're counting on some big twist at the end to suddenly connect all the seemingly loose threads to each other. It may help the viewer to know that this does happen, but only at the end, and I did spend much of the time frustrated that there would be no relief to this deliberately complicated movie.

The saving grace of Trance is that, pointless as some of its story developments seem, it's a very entertaining movie. It's like chewing bubblegum and not knowing how long the sweetness will last. But you're content while it does, and it provides enough of the sensations promised to justify its existence. The casting is very good too: McAvoy convinces as the somewhat pathetic auctioneer whose life is in jeopardy; Vincent Cassel makes for both an intimidating and suave mastermind with Danny Sapani, Matt Cross, and Wahab Skeikh playing his cohorts, and Rosario Dawson exudes a kind of sexy control over all the male characters.

The questions Trance raises about our very unreliable memories are probably the most fascinating thing about the movie. These have been asked before, perhaps most recently in Inception (and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). But Trance goes the route of science rather than dreams, allowing that the right person with the right training and knowledge can erase someone's memory or help him recall it, and this proves to be a site of anxiety for the movie to exploit. After all, much of if not all of one's identity ultimately finds its grounding in memory and the idea that we are free agents who do things which become indelibly etched into the past, our past. Our memories prove that we have lived. McAvoy's character becomes helpless because of his inability to remember the crucial piece of information--where he put the damned painting--and Dawson becomes a sort of memory shaman.

Trance has a preposterous "what-the-hell" quality that simultaneously puts it in the ranks of the purely entertaining thriller and the purely ridiculous one, depending on the moment. But it's exciting and fun despite (or perhaps because of) its mock-cleverness, which makes it a very hard movie to resist. 101 min. ★★★