'Steve Jobs' plays man versus machine
When is someone going to open a window in Aaron Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs”? Alas, wrong operating system.
Sorkin has dispensed with the traditional format of the biopic, instead framing the life of the Apple co-founder and turtlenecked tech deity in three backstage dramas ahead of major product launches: the Macintosh in 1984, NeXT in 1988 and the iMac in 1998.
In the behind-the-scenes swirl, Jobs (Michael Fassbender) is visited each time by ghosts of products past: Apple engineer Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) and Jobs’ daughter, Lisa (played by three actresses), whose paternity Jobs initially disputes.
It’s a scheme of three-act purity, as tightly compacted as the circuitry of an iPod, and one that few besides Sorkin would dare to attempt.
Though the script is adapted from Walter Isaacson’s book, it feels more like a play that director Danny Boyle has transferred to the screen.
Cloistered inside its claustrophobic casing, the movie hums with the high processing capacity of Sorkin’s dialogue. In dressing rooms and the bowels of theaters, Jobs, flanked by his right-hand woman Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), is the egomaniacal mind amid the media storm of his making.
What does Steve Jobs do? That’s the question Wozniak puts to him, and the one the film, itself, is an answer to. Jobs is the big-picture visionary, the bullheaded narcissist and, above all, the knowing conductor of talent and ideas.
Every interaction bears the tension of tolerance: How much do we accept from a man of some genius? It’s not much fun being around a guy who compares himself to Julius Caesar and sees assassins all around.
He’s as puny as he is mighty, a flawed man who made perfect machines.
“Steve Jobs” hangs heavily, melodramatically, on his relationship with Lisa.
Why has Sorkin, an acknowledged technology neophyte who also penned “The Social Network,” become the go-to for some of the greatest tech minds of our time? Perhaps because his rat-tat-tat exchanges gives us some sense of the computing power of elite minds.
Boyle, whose greatest talent is in his slick manipulation of time, is in firm control of the screenplay’s high-velocity rhythm.
The adventurous Boyle feels a little hemmed in here, as does the naturally mischievous Fassbender. But Fassbender captures the thin-skinned sensitivity and detailed obsessiveness of Jobs. In his hands, Sorkin’s dialogue crackles.
The film often does too: the full Sorkin treatment has electrified a well-trod subject. But it also smothers it in artifice. In “Steve Jobs,” Sorkin does the conducting.
