Jobs (***)

The late Steve Jobs was a classic rags-to-riches success story, an avatar of the tech revolution, and a peculiar, particular individual. This helped make Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography a fascinating read and a runaway bestseller, and it makes him a good film character. This biopic begins with a graying Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) introducing the product, the iPod, that assured that Apple Computer would remain an important company in the new century. However, the rest of the film is set earlier, with Jobs as the scrappy underdog. Director Joshua Michael Stern skips over his childhood and how Jobs’s father’s inspired his interest in technology (and the epiphany he had at age 12 when he realized he was smarter than his old man), or how he met Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Instead, it begins in 1974. The 1960s were over, but Jobs turned on, tuned in (to Dylan, especially), and dropped out of Reed College while continuing to audit courses he liked, such as one in typography that helped inspired his love of good design.

In nearly every respect, Jobs is a biopic that Jobs would find quite flattering. Even his tantrums seem in service of creating a better product, and ditto his early attempts to deny the paternity of his out-of-wedlock daughter. You can almost hear him saying How can I change the future of personal computing if I have to deal with a kid? And you’ll sort of agree. Likewise, it’s impossible to see Jobs’s foes at Apple — primarily Board Chairman Arthur Rock (J. K. Simmons) and 1980s CEO John Scully (Mathew Modine) — as anything but folks who just don’t get it. Jobs’s later success makes it difficult not to agree with that view, but Isaacson suggests that Jobs’s immaturity had some role in his eventual fallout with the board and makes it at least possible to question his choices. The financial success of Microsoft makes it clear that, as a business model, there was another path rather than the high-control, perfectionist model Jobs espoused. However, the film does bring across that financial success, while important, was not what drove him.

As a longtime Mac user, I may be biased, but despite the somewhat two-dimensional portrait of its subject, the Apple story is a good story. (Other aspects of Job’s life, like his role in starting Pixar Animation Studios, are not mentioned, or de-emphasized.) The film has the chronology about right, Kutcher is made to look uncannily like Jobs and, though I have not seen Jobs on film that much, he seemed to have his mannerisms down pat. (Josh Gad seemed well case as Wozniak.) Kutcher has a cockiness about him that works in the part. Aaron Sorkin is reportedly working on a film adaptation of Isaacson’s book, and there’s an obvious parallel between the forceful personalities of Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, subject of the Sorkin-penned The Social Network. I expect Sorkin’s version of the story to better highlight Job’s difficult side, or present his story with more complexity. I expect it to have quicker pacing and more snappy dialogue; this one’s most memorable line for me came when Jobs threatens Bill Gates on the phone after learning that Microsoft planned to release an operating system — Windows — that imitated many features of the Mac interface. Like the products Jobs created, Jobs has most of the rough edges smoothed out, but is handsome to look at.

IMDb link

viewed 8/14/13 at AMC Cherry Hill [PFS screening] and posted 8/17/13

The Social Network (***3/4)

It’s a little weird watching Mark Zuckerberg’s rise as a piece of history, since just seven years ago he was just a Harvard sophomore and the word Facebook was just a word referring to an online—or paper—yearbook for a social club. As the film begins, Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) ruminates—frequently in the same breath—on the number of geniuses in China, his perfect SAT score, the rowing team, and the difference between final clubs and finals clubs. Dating him is like “dating a Stairmaster” says his soon-to-be-ex girlfriend, before dumping him with a hilarious putdown. “Asshole” is the term she uses, and understandably, she doesn’t want to hang out with one. Yet there is almost no one more fun to watch on screen. What is the series House, after all?

Zuckerberg’s patter, and the putdown, are presumably the words of Aaron Sorkin, whose famously fast-paced dialogue graced the television series he created, like Sports Night and The West Wing. Sorkin’s dialogue is full of quotable lines like the above. Keeping the narrative in focus is director is David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Zodiac, Fight Club), veteran chronicler of the vagaries of human behavior. Though more or less chronological, the movie is structured around two lawsuits. One pits Zuckerberg against twin preppies, from whom, they claim, he stole the idea for Facebook. In the other the adversary is a former friend. I’ve seen courtroom dramas before, but this is a deposition drama. If the idea of watching someone get asked routine questions by lawyers in a conference room for large chunks of time is not your idea of high drama, you may be surprised. When the deponent is one as extreme as (the movie version of) Zuckerberg, it becomes a fascinating look at the character.

He’s being deposed in both cases at once, and is feeling especially hostile because, as usual, he knows he’s right. And maybe he is. Or not. The law has weighed in on both cases, but the ethics are debatable, and Fincher and Sorkin take the time to present the issues well. One is about the value of an idea. What is the idea of Facebook worth without Zuckerberg’s insights that have made it ubiquitous? The other case asks, What do we owe those who have helped us but are no longer needed?

Otherwise, the movie tells the history of Facebook, from its inception to the point at which it was already spreading globally. I’ve never used Facebook, but it’s still an amazing story. Perhaps Zuckerberg’s key insight was to see that students didn’t just want to chat with each other, but to know about each other. And so the addition of “relationship status” becomes a key moment. Zuckerberg may be an asshole, but he’s also hard not to be impressed by. And although he doesn’t really become nicer in the course of the movie, there is one thing that does make him seem more likeable, which is that Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) comes off like an even bigger asshole. Parker, the onetime founder of the mp3-download site Napster, is the Faustian character who lures Zuckerberg west. Where Zuckerberg is smug, Parker is just obnoxious. Where Zuckerberg is introverted, Parker is a party boy. Timberlake is terrific in the part.

There are a lot of terrific things in this fun, thought-provoking film.

IMDB link

viewed 9/9/10 at Rave UPenn [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/9–/10