Steve Jobs
Directed by: Danny Boyle
Written by: Aaron Sorkin - Based on the book by Walter Isaacson
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg, Katherine Waterston, Sarah Snook, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, Makenzie Moss
Biography/Drama - 122 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 14 Oct 2015
Written by: Aaron Sorkin - Based on the book by Walter Isaacson
Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels, Michael Stuhlbarg, Katherine Waterston, Sarah Snook, Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, Makenzie Moss
Biography/Drama - 122 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 14 Oct 2015
The feeling is very rare. When it comes along, I hope you’re smart enough to sit back and realize what’s happening before the credits roll and the lights come back on. Every now and again, perhaps a handful of times a year, I realize I am sitting through an absolute masterpiece. It’s all working. The actors reach an unknown plane, the writer prepared whip smart dialogue, the director brings us up and drops us down, and the score reminds me to put it on replay during my daily commute. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Jobs is that good. Phenomenal and fantastic sound mundane when asked how it was. It is pure cinema. This is why I go to the movies.
I’ve always admired Aaron Sorkin – I envy any person with the talent to write at that level. Whatever the story, two Marines accused of murder in A Few Good Men, TV shows about sporting news or the west wing, and even a movie about baseball sabermetrics, the man habitually nails us to our seats with his words. Steve Jobs is his best yet. That is not a platitude, ranking all of his work, this Steve Jobs adapted screenplay is Sorkin’s greatest achievement to date. Based on Walter Isaacson’s book about the eponymous antihero, Sorkin, in a brilliant move, transformed the book into a three-act play.
I’ve always admired Aaron Sorkin – I envy any person with the talent to write at that level. Whatever the story, two Marines accused of murder in A Few Good Men, TV shows about sporting news or the west wing, and even a movie about baseball sabermetrics, the man habitually nails us to our seats with his words. Steve Jobs is his best yet. That is not a platitude, ranking all of his work, this Steve Jobs adapted screenplay is Sorkin’s greatest achievement to date. Based on Walter Isaacson’s book about the eponymous antihero, Sorkin, in a brilliant move, transformed the book into a three-act play.
There is no Steve Jobs was born here, did this, or did that by the numbers formula. Sorkin broke the movie into three separate pieces, all launches of his most well known products. All of the characters are real but these conversations most likely never took place and they certainly did not occur just prior to gargantuan press spectacles such as a product launch. We meet the same recurring characters in each act and Jobs (Michael Fassbender, 2014’s X-Men: Days of Future Past) has it out with each and every one of them, consistently. It’s not that Jobs worked with awful people, endured corrupt bosses, and maintained a family who hated him. Jobs is his own worst enemy. He pushes, he pokes, he screams, he rants, and he makes people better.
Act 1 is set in the Flint Auditorium at De Anza Community College in Cupertino, CA, the exact place in 1984 where Jobs and Apple launched the Macintosh. The stage in the film is the actual stage the real life Jobs presented on. Each act is roughly 40 minutes long and it is a break neck, you better keep up, spewing volcano of words. Jobs threatens a computer engineer, Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg, 2012’s Hitchcock), that he better make the Macintosh say “hello” to the audience or he will ruin his life. None of us doubt for a second he means it. Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen, 2014’s Neighbors), the brains behind the Apple II, shows up to lend his support to Jobs and asks kindly for him to recognize the old Apple II team of engineers, a kindly gesture Jobs would never acquiesce to. Jobs’s boss and Apple CEO, John Sculley (Jeff Daniels, 2015’s The Martian), reassures Steve but also more than gently reminds him of his obligations to the shareholders.
Lurking back in his dressing room are Jobs’s ex-girlfriend, Crisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston, 2014’s Inherent Vice), and his four-year-old daughter, Lisa, whom he just told the entire world through Time Magazine that he could not be the father of going so far as labeling Crisann a wanton woman in so many words. Corralling all of these braying donkeys is Jobs’s marketing director, Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet, 2015’s Insurgent). Hoffman only gets a few pages in Isaacson’s book but Sorkin makes her a leading character that is the only person on Earth able to stand up and fight back at Jobs’s relentless attacks, even if her faint Polish accent curiously fades in and out.
Act 2 jumps forward four years to 1988 and the launch of the NeXT computer. There is no shame if you either don’t remember it or have never heard of it. Known only to Jobs, NeXT was meant to be the failure it was, but it served its purpose, revenge. Act 2 is a mini-revenge play within the whole. After the Macintosh imploded, Jobs left Apple under murky circumstances. Filmed in the San Francisco Opera House, there could be no more appropriate setting for Jobs’s revenge scheme. John Sculley shows up to point out it was Jobs’s own fault he was booted out of Apple but Jobs is having none of that truth telling. At the end of their scene, Sculley is drenched in sweat knowing full well Jobs will have the last laugh.
Act 2 jumps forward four years to 1988 and the launch of the NeXT computer. There is no shame if you either don’t remember it or have never heard of it. Known only to Jobs, NeXT was meant to be the failure it was, but it served its purpose, revenge. Act 2 is a mini-revenge play within the whole. After the Macintosh imploded, Jobs left Apple under murky circumstances. Filmed in the San Francisco Opera House, there could be no more appropriate setting for Jobs’s revenge scheme. John Sculley shows up to point out it was Jobs’s own fault he was booted out of Apple but Jobs is having none of that truth telling. At the end of their scene, Sculley is drenched in sweat knowing full well Jobs will have the last laugh.
Wozniak, Hertzfeld, Crissann, and Lisa all show up again and while each have their go at Steve, Rogen’s Wozniak takes the blue ribbon this time. He asks the question all of us want to ask, what the hell does Jobs do anyways? He doesn’t code, he’s not an engineer, he has no idea how to make the things he wants made, what does he do? Standing in the orchestra pit, Jobs’s response is a bit too overt for the setting, but of course it works, Sorkin makes it work. Act 3 jumps ahead 10 years to the 1998 iMac launch with Jobs back at Apple about to take over the world. Lisa is now a freshman at Harvard, a situation Jobs handles with the all the grace of a bowling ball bouncing down the stairs. John Sculley and Wozniak return ready to have a last run at the world’s strongest ego, but it’s Stuhlbarg as Hertzfeld who walks away with the most effective scene because rather than join the spitfire dialogue game everyone else plays, he slows down and takes a breath before he speaks.
Weaving in and around all the chaos is Daniel Pemberton’s virtuoso score. Mostly synths and plucky keyboards, the music connotes the edge of technology, the promise of the future, and even heavy-handed operatic tones during Act 2. Director Danny Boyle (2013’s Trance) expertly piles scenes with layer upon layer of drama and crises before he finally lets Jobs go out there on the stage and introduce the world to the next gizmo that may or may not revolutionize it. We never see the actual launches though, that is not the movie. We’re not here for the gadgets. We’re here to see a man who had a vision farther and clearer than any of us will ever have. Sorkin, Boyle, and Fassbender combine to create a Shakespearean aura around Steve Jobs. I rave about this film because this level of aptitude and effort is not released onto a screen every Friday; we’re lucky if we get this a couple times a year. Grab onto it while you can.
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