Steve Jobs—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

Steve Jobs. Released: October 2015. Runtime: 122 mins. Rated: R for language.

Those flickering pieces of light that you see on a screen conveying a story or making a point have been given a number of names over the past 120 years or so of their existence: moving picture, motion picture, cinema, film, photoplay, movie, flick. The term “photoplay” is seldom used today but might quite appropriately be applied to Steve Jobs, which is not a “photographed play” but does have a certain play-like quality.

It is not a conventional biopic, showing the whole arc of the life of some noted person. Instead, it presents three episodes, almost as if they were the three acts of a play, from the life of Jobs, the Apple Inc. genius behind the development of some of the most important elements of the digital revolution, the revolution that has been reshaping our world for the past 40 years—with no end of reshaping in sight.

Like so many plays, the film's settings are, for the most part, confined to a few rooms, in this case “backstage” at three (in 1984, 1988, 1998) of Jobs' famed launches of new computer products. And like so many plays, the film's dialogue is its most striking feature, the most striking because the right spoken words can offer insights into the “character” of the characters. And Aaron Sorkin, writer of the  screenplay, is a master of the spoken word.

Sorkin, an actor/playwright in the 1980s, became a noted writer of TV (including The West Wing series) and film scripts in the 1990s and has been gathering accolades ever since. He won an Oscar for The Social Network (2010) about another key figure in the history of the digital revolution.

Steve Jobs skillfully intertwines the efforts of Jobs (Michael Fassbender) to see his design, development and marketing visions—such as for the Macintosh, NeXT and iMac computers—brought to fruition, with his tangled relationships with his ex-girlfriend Chrisann (Katherine Waterston) and Lisa, their child (Makenzie Moss; Ripley Sobo; Perla Haney-Jardine). The central relationship issue is for Steve to acknowledge Lisa as his child and to accept some responsibility for her raising and care.

At the 1984 presentation of the Macintosh, Steve denies that Lisa, age 5, is his child, despite the undeniable evidence that she most certainly is. By the 1988 presentation of the NeXT computer, he is more accepting of Lisa. New crises have emerged by the time of the iMac presentation in 1998, andJobs has to deal with a now-grown and angry Lisa.     

                                                                  

Along the way Jobs clashes with Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), the friend with whom he co-founded Apple, and John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), the older executive who becomes Apple CEO and, in effect, fires Jobs at one point, in a dramatic sequence, one of the few flashbacks in the film. Jobs' colleague Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet, an unrecognizable brunette) seeks to get Jobs to accept his familial responsibilities, but it is hard for the hard-driving visionary to overcome the complicated effects of his own childhood as one born out of wedlock to an American mother and Arab father and almost adopted once by one couple and then adopted by another couple, who were hesitant for a time to give him love because they feared his birth mother might make an attempt to reclaim him.

Michael Fassbender may not bear as strong a physical resemblance to Steve Jobs as Noah Wyle did in the 1999 made-for-TV Pirates of Silicon Valley or Ashton Kutcher in the critically reviled box-office bomb Jobs from 2013, but he captures his character's intensity and the basic integrity underlying his frequent nastiness. Jeff Daniels once again turns in an outstanding supporting performance as the stern, but somewhat paternal, Sculley. Seth Rogen likewise is strong as Wozniak in his split with Jobs. The two younger actresses who play Lisa are appealing without being “cute.” and Perla Haney-Jardine is moving as Lisa as a young woman. Moving, too, is Katherine Waterston as Chrisann.

Steve Jobs is directed by Danny Boyle, who became a cult favorite with Trainspotting (1996) and scored a popular success with Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Both Boyle and that film won Oscars. Boyle's excellent casting and his use of just the right degree of “opening up” the dramatic structure of the movie by a few brief, but telling, flashbacks and scenes “out front” rather than backstage brand Steve Jobs as a quality work. The “talking fast while walking fast” technique characteristic of Sorkin projects is also in evidence here, almost to an exhausting degree. Your enjoyment of the film will be enhanced if you know something of the history of the digital revolution in advance, but that is not really necessary.

“Footnotes” to the film: (1) The casting of the movie's lead underwent a number of changes, with Tom Cruise and Christian Bale, among others, considered for the role. (2) Aaron Sorkin himself is seen in one scene of the film.