23).ĭirected by Danny Boyle and featuring a cracking good script by Aaron Sorkin, the drama aggressively eschews normal biopic methodology for a curious three-act structure that works for the most part: The movie focuses on Jobs in the moments before three huge launches, while also tracking the tech giant’s rise and fall and rise again. Michael Fassbender embodies the iconic Apple co-founder in more ways than just wearing his trademark black turtleneck, jeans and New Balance sneakers in the striking and innovative Steve Jobs (***½ out of four rated R opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles, nationwide Oct. No need to reboot again, because Hollywood has finally found its man. If Boyle and Sorkin want to go on to make a movie about a glamorous innovative genius who was not a man, I suggest Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood star who patented communication technology that made mobile phones possible.The wait for the definitive onscreen Steve Jobs has been as arduous as the anticipation for the next iPhone. Yet we are still left with a drama that is genuinely concerned with thinking and ideas relevant to the way we live now.
The final scenes are, arguably, contrived and emollient. Jobs is concerned only with what will be. With icy ruthlessness, he is concerned only with the future, and maybe the film is even hinting at the import of Wozniak’s nickname “Woz” – a hint of “was”.
But he has a tough time understanding that he has betrayed his daughter by not acknowledging her, and has betrayed his old buddy Steve Wozniak by refusing to acknowledge the work done by Wozniak’s team on the earlier product, the now uncool and obsolete Apple II. He is obsessed with betrayal, that is, other people’s betrayal of him – like the colleague who talked about his private life to Time magazine, and Sculley, who he feels ousted him from Apple in the 1980s. This Steve Jobs is a bully and a blowhard who runs on the rocket fuel of pure male self-pity. Kate Winslet as Jobs’s long-suffering marketing executive and confidante Joanna Hoffman. Fassbender’s performance is harder, fiercer and blanker, understandably as a result of showing him at three of the most unrelaxed times of his life. It is perhaps a drawback of this film, or of Jobs’s own monomaniacally driven existence, that the characters who have the least presence are those who have only a non-professional or purely human connection with Jobs: the troubled mother of his child, Chrisann (Katherine Waterston) and his neglected daughter Lisa, finally played in adult life by Perla Haney-Jardine.įassbender gives an entirely fluent and commanding performance, although oddly it was poor old Ashton Kutcher in the unloved 2013 biopic Jobs who resembled the great man more, with a more saturnine and quizzical face. This indoor firework display is smoothly realised by director Danny Boyle who balances and coordinates Michael Fassbender’s star workload and screentime with that of his supporting cast: long-suffering marketing executive and confidante Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), tricked out in nerdy hair and glasses, designer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), CEO and quasi-dad John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) and former Apple compadre and quasi-brother Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), who feels horribly abandoned and let down. The extraordinary moment at the beginning showing an eccentric approach to foot-washing is neither remarked on nor repeated.
It focuses on three private crises: Jobs’s backstage meltdowns before the product launches of his Apple Mac in 1984, his ill-fated NeXT computer in 1988, and the iMac in 1998, by which time he has fully developed his sartorial style of rimless glasses and black polo-neck tucked Seinfeldishly into laundered Levi’s. This film about the great Apple designer Jobs, played by Michael Fassbender, is an intimate and theatrically ingenious piece, adapted from the authorised biography by Walter Isaacson. For each of his films there must surely be another, unreleased one with all the same characters, who stay in bed all day and stare at the wall. The tropes are familiar, but this is still another very exhilarating and exasperating two-hour guitar solo of a movie from Sorkin, an alpha male display of cerebral confrontation and conceit featuring a male diva to whom respect must be paid and with whom arguments are humiliatingly lost. For Steve Jobs, on the other hand, he’s created a fast-talking, arrogant, emotionally illiterate genius-innovator obsessed with boardroom betrayal. F or The Social Network, the movie about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin created a fast-talking, arrogant, emotionally illiterate genius-innovator obsessed with boardroom betrayal.