Archive for year: 2015

There are amazing stories in the life of Steve Jobs: how two kids in a garage took on one of the world’s most powerful companies, IBM, and came out on top; how Steve Jobs, after getting fired, came back to Apple and returned it from near-bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world; how he led the invention of two products – the iPod and the iPhone – that revolutionized two industries as well as the leisure-time activities of not only all Americans but so many citizens of the world. These are alluded to in this documentary by Alex Gibney, but not much more. Instead, we are given a scattershot of vignettes from Jobs’s career that seem to address, not the question posed by Gibney of why Jobs was so revered when he died, but a more general point of view: “Yes, but…”

The qualifications that Gibney harps on, furthermore, are presented without much context. Sure, Apple tried to minimize its tax liabilities, but what corporation doesn’t? Yes, he wanted his compensation increased, but what ceo doesn’t? Apple products are manufactured in China in working conditions below American standards – let’s see the list of companies you can say that about. He is not a warm and fuzzy human being – well, sorry, no one is worshiping Jobs because he is a saint, and so much of Gibney’s movie seems beside the point.

More generally, I was distracted by the constant cutting and mixing of Jobs at different ages, with vastly different appearances. There was no chronology to the film, just different chapters: the daughter he denied; the prototype phones that got lost in bars; his car; dealings with journalists; backdating stock options (confusing); his health. Subjects seemed chosen based on the availability of on-camera interviewees or grainy film clips. In all, the movie was fascinating just because the subjects – Jobs and Apple – are so fascinating and so much a part of our lives. It also helped to have read Walter Isaacson’s book that covered all the same ground. But as a movie, the lack of focus, lack of organization and lack of perspective left me feeling empty, if not annoyed, as I looked back and left me wondering, was this rushed into theaters to beat the next Jobs movie due out next month?

“I had sex today,” announces 15-year-old Minnie in the opening scene, and that’s pretty much all that happens. When we learn that the sex was with her mother’s slacker boyfriend, a certain uneasiness, not to mention creepiness, sets in, but even then the ultimate explosion we see coming is rather muted. Kristen Wiig is wonderful as the San Francisco 1976 free-spirit mother, but she seems as emotionally detached – drunk or stoned? – as we the viewer remain. Minnie’s compulsion to share her experiences with her tape recorder is a stand-in for the author’s urge to write this book, if not the (also female) director’s desire to make this movie.

An intense psychological thriller, with both leads acting up a storm in a confined space, making us think and feel all at once and constantly. Reviewers cite a similarity to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which I either don’t remember or didn’t see, but I felt an echo of Gaslight in the manipulative husband-wife relationship, or even Pygmalion, as Johnny tries to mold the girl from the gutter into a facsimile wife. How Nelly grows from an Auschwitz burn victim to regain her identity is the core of the movie, and the only thing that makes clear sense.

Director Christian Petzold has brilliantly hit on postwar Germany as a fertile setting for stories of moral grays, and he has larded Phoenix with enough ambiguities of plot to make us question not only the characters’ actions and motives, but also what exactly happens. Perhaps the characters are metaphors, but for what? Who is Lene, the first character we see, and what is her connection to Nelly? Are they would-be lovers? If she is “Mrs. Winter,” where is Mr.? Is Nelly Jewish? She claims not to be, but why? If this is so obvious, what is the meaning of the scene where Lene discovers an official document that lists Nelly as a Jew? More important, did Johnny betray her to the Nazis? The evidence is strong but circumstantial, and it comes from Lene, who has her own reasons for drawing Nelly away from him.

Some internet reviewers have complained about the implausibilities of the story – that things as major as the facial reconstruction and as minor as the pivotal Kurt Weill song – are anachronistic. To me, these are beside the point, the point being the psychological struggles of Nelly and, to a lesser extent, Johnny. What does bother me immensely, in retrospect, is the introduction, late in the movie, of a paper documenting Johnny’s divorce from Nelly. Why would Lene withhold this information until her deathbed, when she is so insistent that Nelly forget him? Why does he think – and this is crucial to the story – that he will share in her fortune if he has divorced her? Maybe he is planning to remarry her and we just haven’t been told? Is no one else among their friends aware of this divorce? Would this document have survived the war, and would Lene have been able to find it? (Again, this last cries out for the missing backstory of who she is.) Maybe this is all explained in the novel upon which the film is based, and maybe some answers would be clearer to a German audience, but I felt a bit cheated: Johnny, who was introduced as a cad, was being progressively portrayed in a more sympathetic (and brighter) light before this thunderbolt came out of the blue. It seemed the director was done with the moral grays and wanted to set up a clearer black-and-white contrast to make the final scene as dramatic, and satisfying, as it was. Not that it resolved much, which in the end was another, if accidental, beauty of the movie.