STEVE JOBS

Steve Jobs

Grade: B+

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, Seth Rogen, Michael Stuhlbarg and Katherine Waterston, and with Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo and Perla Haney-Jardine as Lisa Brennan at ages 5, 9, and 19

Premise: Computer pioneer Steve Jobs must deal with overworked colleagues, bitter acquaintances, company superiors, the press, and his turbulent personal life just before three of the major product launches of his career.

Rated R for constant strong language

Steve Jobs might be the greatest movie ever that is all dialogue and no plot.

Put another way, Steve Jobs might be exactly the kind of film movie studio executives were describing—though they may not have known it—when they came up with the term “talkies” in the late 1920s, because that is what this movie is: people talking.

That that talk was thought up and put on paper by Oscar-winner Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, TV’s The West Wing) means it’s going to be rat-a-tat, balls-to-the-wall, English-language-fireworks talking, which can be thrilling in its execution but can be dread-inducing and exhausting to an audience because it means the characters onscreen are never going to stop and think what they’re about to say, which means they will never defuse or avoid conflict or take the easy way out. Directed by Oscar-winner Danny Boyle (whose diverse resume includes Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 Hours), and adapted from the biography “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs is a feisty, fiery, unflinching verbal circus that depicts what it was like to be in the immediate circle of Jobs just before three of the landmark product launches of his career. The result is a film that is a masterpiece of acting and blocking--featuring several awe-inspiring moments that ensure Oscar is going to come a’calling--but can, admittedly, get a bit wearying as it works through its third act. There’s no doubt it doesn’t get much better than this when it comes to high-level filmmaking, though.

Plot

In 1984, fresh off the success of its legendary 1984-themed Super Bowl ad, Apple was preparing to unveil the Macintosh, and the front-man for the Macintosh was none other than Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender), who, along with Steve Wozniak, had put Apple on the map with the hit personal computers Apple I and Apple II. Already worth hundreds of millions, the headstrong, titanically-driven, hyper-focused Jobs is surrounded by critics, well-wishers, and exasperated employees. One such employee is his assistant, Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), who alone seems to be able to talk sense into her boss and make him see reason. Another employee, software expert Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) is pushed to the absolute brink by his perfectionist boss’s unyielding technical demands (Jobs wants to put on a good show for his audience at the launch). There’s Jobs’ boss, Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), who, though not a tremendous fan of some of Jobs’ marketing schemes, can only toast his front man and then sit back and watch the dough roll in. There’s Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), Jobs’ old friend and colleague, whose relationship with Jobs has soured over Jobs’ continued success, widespread appeal and gargantuan ego. Finally, there’s the not insignificant matter of Jobs’ old girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston), who’s on welfare and has a 5-year-old daughter, Lisa (Makenzie Moss), who has proven through tests to almost certainly be Jobs’.

In 1988, after a fall from grace at Apple, Jobs is with computer programmer NeXT, which is ready to launch a nifty, specially-shaped cube, which he calls his comeback but which those close to him (like Joanna) know is really his “get back at Apple” item. Even as he relishes the idea of the cube bringing him back into relevance, he carries a massive chip on his shoulder, which can’t help revealing itself even during well-wisher visits by Wozniak and Sculley.

Ten years later, after Apple has nearly gone out of business following the failure of an early tablet-like device, Jobs has been re-hired as the CEO, and his sleek, colorful iMac is about to hit the market. Its projected sales figures are historic. But Jobs is still dogged by a grumbling Wozniak, still fretting over the flake his daughter’s mother turned out to be, still hissing at his employees’ grumbles about him, and battling his me-first mind to determine how, exactly, to relate to and parent his now 19-year-old daughter (Perla Haney-Jardine).

What Doesn’t Work?

In high school, I had to read and write a report on Jonathan Swift’s classic Gulliver’s Travels. While I enjoyed the book, as I moved into the novel’s latter sections, I noticed it seemed to be recycling the same elements and ideas over and over again—Gulliver would happen upon a new civilization, be adopted into the civilization, be marveled over, learn the civilization's customs and language, and soon become as one of them. It happened four times, first with the famously-tiny Lilliputians and then with the giant citizens of Brobdingnag and so on. It was all interesting, but it started to lose its effect after a while, as ideas were very clearly recycled. While Steve Jobs’ three sections don’t fall into formula nearly as easily, the nonstop chatter, all among the same four or five characters and most of it about the same topics (including a lot of big words and/or difficult-to-understand concepts like the size and speed of computer hardware and software) becomes wearying. It’s true it helps build Jobs’ character—things could work differently if he wasn’t such an A-hole a lot of the time—but, as marvelously-acted and rat-a-tat as most of these scenes are, it’s a lot to sit through.

What Works?

That being said, if it wasn’t made by the first-class pedigreed likes of Boyle and Sorkin, or acted out by this troupe of actors, it would certainly not be nearly as watchable. "Watchable” is a gentle term, however—watching Steve Jobs is like being in the passenger seat in a speeding car in which the driver seems capable of doing anything: running through a red light, making a sharp turn on two wheels, racing up a hill to get air-time at the crest and stopping or not stopping in heavy traffic. There’s rarely a moment to catch your breath, and for a movie that’s short on things happening and almost all people talking, that it generates that sort of effect is kind of terrific.

But what talking to get to do! Sorkin is the same kind of genius writer as Quentin Tarantino in that he’s a master craftsman who can just own a film, and he makes actors who master his dialogue look good. First, Sorkin led six different actors on The West Wing to acting Emmy wins over 7 seasons as one of TV’s most celebrated shows. Then he made household names out of Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer and Rooney Mara in The Social Network. And now, well, this acting crew may well divebomb the Oscars.

Certainly the first name to come to anyone’s mind regarding Steve Jobs should be that of Michael Fassbender, the celebrated actor (of Shame, 12 Years A Slave and X-Men) who appears in every scene—and nearly every frame—as Steve Jobs. Watching Fassbender’s performance here is like watching a quarterback throwing touchdown pass after touchdown pass. Jobs’ own biographer, Walter Isaacson, described Jobs as having a “passion for perfection and ferocious drive”—Fassbender gives you that and then some. He’s an inspiring and exciting but equally infuriating and even terrifying individual, portrayed here as someone who’s always the smartest, most magnetic man in the room and knows it. Jobs is both the villain and hero of this piece, and sure to land the Irish-born actor in the Best Actor category at the Oscars if not landing him the trophy outright.

Going up against Fassbender when he’s hitting it out of the park, the rest of Steve Jobs’ ensemble has to hold their own weight, and they do. Winslet, though hampered slightly by an Eastern European accent (her character is Polish) that occasionally disappears only to come back stronger in the next scene, is heroic (in fact, Joanna might be the hero of this piece) as the only person to land any punches on Jobs that he can’t just shrug off. Her commitment to sticking by her boss is, frankly, incredible, given the grief she takes. And a Supporting Actor nomination may well come calling, for the first time, for either Jeff Daniels or Seth Rogen or both—each has two magnificent verbal shootouts with Fassbender, with Daniels playing the corporate stiff for the second time this month (after The Martian) and Rogen bringing a wounded edge to the generally good-humored, but clearly overlooked, Wozniak. In smaller roles, Stuhlbarg, Waterston, and the three young actresses who play Jobs’ daughter Lisa each own their own small parts of the film, often providing the heart and emotion necessary for the movie to not be completely cold and hard-eyed.

Content

Steve Jobs is rated R for the four-letter words that creep up in Sorkin’s vast and heavy repertoire. There’s nothing else—no nudity, violence, sensuality, or over-the-top emotional moments—that's particularly off-putting…except, that is, for the film’s breakneck pace, its procedural structure, and the polarizing figure at its center.

Bottom Line

It’s difficult to believe the real Steve Wozniak watched this film and was quoted as saying it was “like watching the real Steve”. Parts of this movie make you wonder why, then, anyone bothered to put up with him. Well, other than the fact that about 99 percent of us enjoy one or more of his brainchild inventions (iPod, iPad, iMac, Macbook, iPhone, iTunes, etc…), as Steve Jobs—which is based on his official biography—argues, it's because he was a visionary. A self-centered, unrelenting taskmaster? Sometimes, sure…but a smart, charismatic, creative, colorful genius as well. This movie is all talk—all insanely-explosive, edge-of-your-seat dialogue—which can be tiresome for two full hours, but its top-flight, Oscar-worthy director, writer and actors make it worthwhile and, at times, spectacular.

Steve Jobs (2015)

Directed by Danny Boyle

Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin

Based on the biography “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

Rated R

Length: 122 minutes