Jobs

Here is a movie that pulls off the neat trick of being better than I thought it would be, while simultaneously also being as disappointing as I feared it would.  As a bio-picture on the man behind Apple Computers, Jobs is about as standard as you could think.  It selects bits and pieces of certain moments from Steve Jobs' life, giving us very little to go on for what happened in-between.  If the film feels rushed, that's probably because it was. (The film went into production a mere six months after he died.) And yet, we also have some very nice individual moments throughout, and a surprisingly captivating performance by Ashton Kutcher in the title role.  It even manages to be compelling at times.  But it can't escape its scattershot and sometimes random story structure.

The movie tries to pick and choose the key events of Jobs' life from the time he was in college, right up to about the start of the 21st Century.  Given the roughly two hour time frame, this is tricky, but not impossible.  There have been very successful movies that have managed to cover the great moments of a figure's life, but this isn't one of them.  Perhaps an approach similar to last year's Lincoln, which centered on a specific time of President Lincoln's life, rather than cover his whole story, would have worked better here.  It might have made things less confusing.  There's a real lack of a sense of time in this film, as we jump from one major event to the next.  Some of the jumps are even oddly unexplained.  For example, at one point late in the film, we're suddenly introduced to his wife and son, even though we have never seen them before up to that point.  And in that same scene, a daughter he had with another woman that he had refused to acknowledge up to that point in the film, is suddenly sleeping on his couch with absolutely no explanation whatsoever, nor do we see or hear from her ever again after that.  I don't think that the script by Matt Whiteley is to blame here, as I have a strong hunch that this film was severely edited before it hit screens.

Even with a flimsy and sometimes incoherent grasp on the events of its topic's life, the one thing that holds this film together is the performance by Ashton Kutcher, who not only looks like him in certain scenes, but even has the man's mannerisms down.  Kutcher has never been a favorite of mine, and I was very worried when I heard the casting initially.  However, he manages to capture the charisma and the passion of Steve Jobs.  I also admired that the film is not a complete fluff piece.  While it certainly celebrates him, it also takes time to focus on the fact that he was not an easy person to work for, had a hard time relating with others, was quick to fits of verbal rage, and drove some people who were close to him away.  And yet, because we feel like we are only getting bits and pieces of the guy's life during a roughly 25 year time span, the characterization never feels as complete as it should.  Kutcher looks, moves, and acts like the man he's supposed to be portraying, but he's still not a total character, even if it's through no fault of his own.

For the first 20 minutes or so, Jobs is quite shaky as it centers on his college years, with him doing drugs, having sex, and slowly building the philosophy that will be the basis of his adult life.  It's not until he partners up with Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad from Broadway's Book of Mormon), first on a video game project for Atari, and then on the idea that would eventually become Apple Computers that the movie starts to take shape a little.  Apple is initially a struggling start up company based in the garage of Jobs' parent's house.  But, when financial investor Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney) gets involved, the company is able to become a reality, as well as a real force in the industry.  As the years pass, and Jobs becomes more passionate about creativity and doing what nobody else is doing, the board of directors at Apple (represented by J.K. Simmons) begin to grow nervous, thinking that his methods is costing the company a fortune in delayed and disappointing products.  He is fired, only to be brought back some 10 years later, when the company is on the verge of becoming a memory.  With Jobs' guidance, Apple Computers grows into the juggernaut corporation that it is today.

Even if it does cover some important elements of the story, and makes a convincing argument on how far computers have come in the home in a short time, from a curiosity to a necessity, Jobs still feels like it is missing some vital details.  Anyone hoping to see Steve Jobs' reaction to the launch of Windows that basically copied his design plan will be disappointed that aside from a quick scene where he makes an angry call to Bill Gates, it's not really addressed. (For those interested, there is a very good TV movie on this subject called The Pirates of Silicon Valley.) That said, even if the movie does feel incomplete, and many events are supposedly fabricated (as many of the people involved in the real story claim), Jobs does still entertain on a very basic level.  It's an interesting story to begin with, and even when it is imperfectly told, it can still captivate at times.  At least, it did for me.  At the very least, the performances were enough to hold my attention.  While Kutcher impresses, I also have to point out the performance Josh Gad gives as Wozniak, who makes him very sympathetic.

I've heard talk that there is another movie about Steve Jobs somewhere in the pipeline.  I can only hope that the filmmakers behind that project will use this as an example, not to follow, but to maybe see what blanks they need to fill in when it comes to the storytelling.  This is a well made and well-acted film that, due to the fact it was rushed into production, ultimately comes across as a C-grade research paper.

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