So the new Steve Jobs movie opened this past weekend, and I still haven't seen it, because apparently "opened" means four theaters total, all of them in New York and LA. I looked it up Monday morning out of pure nosiness and the per-screen numbers were something like $130K a theater, which is a stupid amount of money for a movie about a guy standing backstage yelling at people. Wide release isn't until the 23rd. So I've got two more weeks of reading other people's reactions before I get my turn, which is its own weird kind of torture when you've spent four years writing a blog that exists because of this same guy.
That's not an exaggeration, by the way. I started this blog in November 2011, a few weeks after Jobs died. Wasn't planned that way exactly, I'd been sitting on the idea for months, but his death was the kick that got me to actually register the domain and stop overthinking it. Feels a little strange that we're closing in on four years of this thing existing and there's now a big glossy Danny Boyle movie treating the guy as historical subject matter, soundtrack and all.
The structure is the part that has me curious more than anything. Aaron Sorkin wrote it as three chunks of real time, each one set backstage right before a big product launch — the 1984 Mac, the NeXT cube in '88, the iMac in '98. No decade-spanning biopic sprawl, just three pressurized rooms twenty minutes before curtain, apparently. I like that as a structural gimmick. Biopics almost always try to cram someone's whole life into two hours and end up feeling like a Wikipedia page with better lighting. This one at least picked a shape and committed to it.
Wozniak's reaction is the thing I keep coming back to, though. He consulted on the film and has mostly been positive about it in interviews, but he's also been pretty upfront that some of the actual confrontations on screen didn't happen the way they're staged, especially the backstage blowups. Sorkin's defense, from what I've read, is that he was going for emotional truth over literal transcript accuracy, which, fine, that's a defensible thing to say about a dramatization. But it does put the whole project in a weird spot: it's not quite a documentary, it's not quite fiction, it's this thing in between where you're supposed to trust the feelings are true even when the guy who lived it says the scenes are made up. I don't have a tidy answer for whether that's okay. Depends how much you care, probably.
One complaint, and I'll admit this one isn't really about Jobs at all: everybody in a Sorkin script talks exactly the same. Doesn't matter if it's Wozniak or a marketing exec or a random engineer, they all fire off the same clipped, overlapping, slightly-too-clever dialogue at the same rhythm. It's a tic I've noticed in basically everything he's written since The West Wing, and it works great when the whole cast is supposed to be brilliant people who talk fast for a living, less great when you need someone to sound like an actual regular person having an actual argument. I'll reserve full judgment till I've seen it, but I'd bet money Kate Winslet's the one who manages to sound human despite the dialogue rather than because of it.
Worth remembering there was already a Jobs movie, two years back, with Ashton Kutcher doing the hoodie-and-turtleneck thing, and it was pretty roundly regarded as a mess. Flat, hagiographic, didn't seem to have an actual point of view on the guy beyond "he was a visionary, sometimes a jerk." If this new one can't clear that bar it's not exactly setting a high one, so I'm not going in with much anxiety about it disappointing me. Low bar, decent director, a script structure I actually find interesting on paper.
Anyway. Two weeks. I'll probably end up seeing it opening weekend at the multiplex out by the highway, the one that still charges eleven bucks for a small popcorn like that's a reasonable thing to do to a person, and I'll have opinions, and you'll hear them here same as always.