“Musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.” That’s the explanation that Steve Jobs (well, the version portrayed by Michael Fassbender) gives to explain his role in the tech world. He may not be a designer or a programmer, but he knows the tune and everyone’s going to follow him.
There’s a lot to be said for Steve Jobs, a bold new movie that explores the life of one of the most enigmatic figures of the last century. The film doesn’t seek to simplify Jobs or really even explain much about his personality and likeness as it does give the viewer snapshots of what Jobs may have been like.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, The Newsroom and The West Wing) has created a movie where his machine gun rapid dialogue can really shine.
Instead of creating a traditional biography movie, Sorkin has instead created a three-act film that takes place in near-real time.
Each sequence of the movie is roughly forty-five minutes and takes place before the launch of three products created by Jobs over fourteen years. Director Danny Boyle (Slumdong Millionaire, 127 Hours and 28 Days Later) strategically places the camera and employs crisp editing to avoid claustrophobia in a movie that largely takes place in maybe six rooms, a few hallways, and a brief excursion outside.
He gives the movie pop and energy so that the audience is stimulated visually and can focus on the great dialogue and characters that make up each sequence. The first sequence happens in 1984 before the launch of the Macintosh. Here we see Jobs as a young man on the cusp of what he thinks will be a great achievement.
Fassbender is pure fire and energy in this sequence. An arrogant, young Jobs quickly and curtly cuts to the core of all those around him in order to focus on the task at hand.
After four years and the failure of the Macintosh, we witness a more humble Jobs (note: ‘more humble’ in this instance doesn’t resemble anything close to what a normal person calls ‘humble’) before the release of the NeXT Cube – a beautiful, but useless invention. Jobs has been exiled from Apple, but is scheming to get back in.
The film then takes a massive 10-year jump to the launch of the iMac. Jobs is getting his second bite of Apple. At each of these launches, success is always on the verge of being thwarted by Jobs’ intruding personal life.
One of his chief boosters is Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet). Hoffman is Jobs’ assistant and “work wife”. Winslet gives an incredibly balanced performance, serving as the audience’s conduit to Jobs: displaying awe at Jobs’ brilliance, but a hatred for his personal shortcomings.
She is the only person who seems to be able to stand up to the boss with impunity and the only voice of objective reason. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (a subtle, gentle Seth Rogen) frequently finds himself on the receiving end of what little genuine friendship Jobs has to offer, but also lands undeserved disrespect in their limited, but pivotal interactions.
Rogen is one of the most sympathetic characters in the film, looking like a child constantly being lectured despite not having done anything wrong. One-time Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) changes roles the most significantly throughout the film, going from Jobs’ father figure to his mortal enemy and before the end he manages to land somewhere strangely in-between.
Daniels shines, handling Sorkin’s Tasmanian devil-quick dialogue like an old pro. (He did have three years of training on The Newsroom.) Jobs’ ex-lover Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) shows up to two of three product launches not to cheer Jobs on, but to get in his ear about child support for her daughter Lisa, whom we’re lead to believe Jobs denied paternity of for years.
Waterston’s manic and flakey portrayal of Brennan helps illustrate the most blatant display of Jobs’ shortcoming as a father. If Chrisann is all this girl has, what chance has she got?
Jobs’ daughter, Lisa (age 5 – Mackenzie Moss, age 9 – Ripley Sobo, age 19 – Perla Haney-Jardine), provides the film with its heart. Rejected at every turn and denied a stable parent when she needs one most, she seems to be the point of the film’s tagline: Can a great man be a good man? This trio performance is beautiful and, most astonishingly, believable that one could in fact grow into the other.
I’ve saved Fassbender for last because he is great in a role that he may not have been obviously suited for. He rises to the challenge and provides one of the best performances of the year.
Fassbender doesn’t ever really look like Jobs, but he wholly embodies a man who is torn between great ambition and success and simple human decency and usually sides with the former as opposed to the latter.
Considering that he was essentially the producer’s third choice for the role (behind Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio), Fassbender succeeds every expectation and then some.
Ultimately, what Fassbender, Boyle and Sorkin leave us not with a history of Jobs and his inventions, but provide audiences instead with something much more valuable: a taste of what Steve Jobs may have been like.
After seeing the film, you feel less like you can recite his life story and more like you can tell people what Jobs was like in closed quarters – even if it is all dramatization.
Refreshingly, this is not a paint-by-numbers biopic that fill the theaters every year around Oscar season.
Instead, this is a risky, entertaining piece of biographical fiction that cares more about character than doing a Wikipedia-esque runthrough of a person’s life story. Steve Jobs is a tight-rope walk of a movie that thunders forth with unrelenting wit, verve and ingenuity in all facets.
Brian Laughran
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