But what his actual level consists of, and what makes this hobbling paradox tick? That, unfortunately, remains a mystery.įassbender’s Jobs however, is a horse of a different colour. Wherever Kutcher’s Jobs exists, you get to see who or what is beneath him, and what aspirations lie above him. Right from the beginning, he sells and perhaps even over-sells Jobs’ walk, walking around like a self-conscious, barefoot Muppet as he barks orders at his peers and extemporizes his lofty dreams in the same breath. His Jobs is the right amount of narcissistic for a film that poises him as a ruthless conqueror, and by that I mean he comes off as an unhinged sociopath, but it isn’t just venom and self-absorption that Kutcher perfects. There’s no connective tissue between these ideas, and no discernible evolution for Kutcher to work through (at least none that we see in the final product), but one can’t deny that he brings the fire at every turn, so to speak. Then he’s naming his first computer after her, and then ten years later, they’re living together happily. In the next, he’s doing the same to his unborn daughter.
In one moment, he loathes his biological parents for having rejected him. Not with the performance itself, since he’s doing exactly what he was hired to do, but there’s no getting around the fact that he’s the perfect embodiment of an inherently flawed narrative. Each extreme is measured, from the genuine misanthropy in his eyes to his longing for creation, but the fact that there’s neither a middle ground nor a discernible trajectory along which the switch takes place is a fundamental problem. These are well-documented elements of Jobs’ personality, and Kutcher switches between them like a rogue tennis ball in an airplane bathroom. While the facial resemblance is undeniable (I only just realized it was him on the poster and not the real Steve Jobs), what elevates Kutcher’s performance is his non-stop oscillation between fiery, cutthroat asshole, and sympathetic, misunderstood genius. The most surprising thing about Jobs, and the only thing that really works, is Ashton Kutcher. It’s about their performances and the how they embody each film’s version of Jobs (and what that version even is to begin with), because if you’re looking for a factual re-creation of events, then the aforementioned documentaries in the opening paragraph are probably more your speed. Christian Bale was attached back when it was a Fincher film, and Fassbender’s American accent isn’t exactly the most consistent, but this round isn’t really about resemblance, or even the actors themselves. Whatever the actual reasons for his casting though, Kutcher’s resemblance to the real life Jobs was almost uncanny.įassbender on the other hand, looks and sounds nothing like the man, and he wasn’t even the first choice to play him. The 2013 Jobs cast That ‘70s Shows star and Punk’d host Ashton Kutcher, and regardless of his other work, it was always going to be his public image that came to mind first, the way someone like Brad Pitt is a celebrity first and an actor second to the general public.
The first thing people tend to notice about a biopic is the who’s who of the retelling. What do these films about the co-founder of Apple say about us and the way we tell stories? It’s also buckets of fun to compare two films tackling similar topics, but when their subject was responsible for a great deal of modern culture and technology, it takes on an almost introspective quality.
The man himself was a controversial figure, although undoubtedly iconic, and a head-to-head examination of different approaches to him makes for an interesting case study on how he’s viewed. It’s Versus Month here at BMD, and since the catalyst for that theme is two DC superheroes facing off, what better way to take it a step further than by bringing down the walls of the multiverse and pitting Steve Jobs against himself? In once corner, we have Joshua Michael Stern’s Jobs (originally known as jOBS for some reason), and in the other we have Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, not to be confused with Steve Jobs: One Last Thing, Steve Jobs: Million Dollar Hippy, Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, and Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine, documentaries which came out in the last five years.
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