Movie Review: 'Steve Jobs'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Lest anyone dismiss or underestimate our fascination – good, bad, or otherwise – with tech guru Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, consider this:
Has anyone ever had three motion pictures devoted to him or her in the space of two years?
Jobs has.
Steve Jobs follows Jobs (2013) and Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015) to the movie marketplace, each emerging progressively stronger than its predecessor, and all three warts-and-all portraits worthwhile.
Jobs is a respectable biodrama starring Ashton Kutcher as Apple co-founder Jobs, while Steve Jobs: The Main in the Machine is an engrossing documentary that addresses his complexity and contradictions.
The script for Steve Jobs by Aaron Sorkin, who won a screenplay Oscar for The Social Network and also wrote Moneyball and A Few Good Men, is partially based on the best-selling authorized biography by Walter Isaacson. Its three-act structure, with each act playing out in approximately real time, focuses on three product launches: the Macintosh, the NEXT computer, and the iMac.
Director Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, Trainspotting, The Beach, Millions, Sunshine, Trance) gives each act a different look, shooting on three different formats – grainy 16-millimeter for 1984, glossy 35-millimeter for 1988, and high-definition digital for 1998 -- while he works in a gaggle of Sorkin's trademark walk-and-talk scenes with his superlative dialogue holding us in its sway.
What we are privy to are the melodramatic backstage preparations and arguments and maneuverings, all of which reveal aspects of Jobs' work and family life that underscore the disparity between his public and private personas.
He is, that is, developing products meant to connect people while he fails to connect with just about everybody in his life.
Fassbender, who doesn't really physically resemble Jobs, is spellbinding in an Oscar nomination-worthy performance of ferocious intensity that finds him spewing pages of dialogue at top speed as he displays arrogance, brilliance, narcissism, charisma, condescension, resourcefulness, intolerance, perfectionism, and cruelty. His Jobs is, in short, a heartless visionary – remarkable, but anything but likable – at the center of a movie brimming with ambivalence..
The supporting cast is first-rate: Seth Rogen excellent in a sober portrayal of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak; Kate Winslet as colleague Joanna Hoffman; Jeff Daniels playing Apple CEO John Sculley; Katherine Waterston as Chrisann Brennan, Jobs' girlfriend; Michael Stuhlbarg as Mac team member Andy Hertzfeld; and Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine as Jobs' daughter Lisa at three different ages.
Both Sorkin and Boyle would be quick to tell you that this is definitely not a cradle-to-grave biography, not even close. Sorkin has described it as an "impressionistic portrait" and it works splendidly as just that.
So we'll compute 3½ stars out of 4 for Steve Jobs, a riveting stylized biopic about a guy idolized and despised in about equal measure. Thanks to Sorkin, Boyle, and Fassbender for a Jobs well done.
