The Verge:
I didn’t know Steve Jobs during the early parts of his career — his first stint Apple and then his time running the failed NeXT — which take up most of the movie. And I know very little about his relationship with his daughter Lisa.
But the Steve Jobs I did know — the one the movie never shows — balanced his strong views and his impatience with a willingness to listen to others and to change his mind. In our many conversations, he loved to debate product and tech issues. Yes, we had some shouting matches, but we also had a lot of serious, calm conversation and even some laughs. And, unlike the man in the movie, I saw him listen to, and eventually agree with, contrary views raised by an employee.
Every review I’ve seen of this movie is similar – that it would have been a good movie had it been about an entirely fictitious character. In particular, reviewers have raved about Fasbender. But every person who knew Jobs echoes what Mossberg said – the movie is unfair to Jobs and doesn’t do the entirety of his life — or even the period portrayed — justice.
I’m a big fan of Sorkin, but it seems he was outclassed by the subject matter with this movie and ended up writing what he wanted instead.
I’m sure the pressure to out do Social Network, along with the enormous interest in Jobs at the time Sony commissioned the script from Sorkin, distracted him from truly owning this one. This film had a cloud over it from day one and nobody took firm leadership. Danny Boyle should have pushed back, but capitulated to Universal executive weenies. Can you blame Fincher, Bale, and DiCaprio for passing on what should have been a slam dunk?
Seems to me this is Sorkin’s screenwriting MO, which probably means if you, for some reason, took anything he wrote about real people as anything like accurate, it’s time to revisit that opinion.
I’m actually not a Sorkin fan at all. I usually find his shows precious and overwritten, and I found The Social Network as forgettable as a Facebook post. But I thought “Steve Jobs” was quite good actually. And it was probably a better movie for not trying to be slavishly faithful to events. It was clearly more interested in telling a story about a character than in chronicling the life of a historic figure. And I think that’s okay.
I mean, it’s currently got a metascore of 81 on metacritic.com — clearly some people like it.
So “big fan” = “accurate”?
No, that’s not what I wrote, your inference is wrong.
However, I did expect Sorkin to stay true to the biography and tell a truthful story. This, it seems, he has not done, trading drama for accuracy.
I think it was Isaacson who was outclassed by the subject matter. Sorkin’s just telling stories.
I was more thinking along the lines of the notion, usually applied to the media rather than filmmakers, that if they get things this badly wrong on the subjects you are familiar with, how badly wrong are they on subjects you aren’t familiar with? (Facebook, baseball, politics, etc.)
For the record, I, too, am a fan of Sorkin’s writing style and a lot of his content — it’s just that now that I’ve seen how poorly he adheres to anything like even notional accuracy, I’ve had to re-evaluate some of my feelings on his previous content.