MOVIE REVIEW
“Steve Jobs”
Grade: C+
Starring Michael Fassbender, Seth Rogen and Katherine Waterston. Directed by Danny Boyle.
Rated R for language. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 2 minutes.
Bottom line: A biopic with some liberties taken
“Steve Jobs,” a dazzling shell of a biopic from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Danny Boyle, is a three-act backstage drama about a bullying, insecure, overbearing visionary who learns to be a better father and less of a jerk in the nick of time. His products may be the ones on which you’re reading this review right now. In the film’s eyes, that fact exonerates him from the other, messier stuff.
The last 10 minutes of the movie are bad in a cushy, sentimental way that may help “Steve Jobs” find a wide popular audience in addition to its inevitable Oscar nominations. Much of what precedes the third act percolates nicely, with one good actor after another, starting with Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet, happily chewing away on the granola bars of Sorkin’s dialogue. It takes a while to notice what’s not there, and to suss out the peculiar mixture of finger-pointing and genuflection in the film’s attitude toward Jobs himself.
Act 1, shot on high-grain 16 millimeter film by cinematographer Alwin Kuchler, takes place in 1984. Jobs is about to launch the Macintosh personal computer at a Cupertino, Calif., community college. His surly ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston, misdirected into a perpetual rage) and her 5-year-old daughter (Makenzie Moss), whose paternity Jobs denies, find themselves a few steps from welfare.
Act 2, shot on gleaming 35mm, 1988: Jobs has been summarily bounced from Apple. Backstage at the San Francisco Opera House, he’s readying the launch of an ill-fated, overpriced but strategically shrewd computer called the NeXT Cube, from his new company. Jobs’ daughter, now 9 and played by Ripley Sobo, is an eerily eloquent sprite, dying for affection and some attention from her dad.
The third act jumps ahead a decade, and is photographed digitally, with clean, sharp lines. We’re backstage at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall. The usual suspects, including a figure of conscience, Mac collaborator Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg), return for a final reckoning, to discuss finances, betrayals, grudges and Jobs’ failings of character. The guru at the shiny center of “Steve Jobs” has one way of dealing with any threat to his loss of control over any situation: He wires money at the problem, before shutting down emotionally.
But daughter Lisa (Perla Haney-Jardine plays the 19-year-old edition) calls him on his issues, at long last. This is just after Daniels’ Sculley returns to discuss the Freudian implications of Jobs’ own adoptive childhood. Chagrined yet godlike, Jobs is sent off by director Boyle into a bath of glorious white light, to a promised land of iMacs, iPods, iPhones and the rest, shining like the spotless glass windows of an Apple store just before opening.
Pardon me if I retch just a tiny bit. Jobs’ accomplishments are fantastic, of course, and omnipresent, and they did change the world. But having seen “Steve Jobs” twice now, I’d like to ask Sorkin what he really thinks of the man.
Fans of the whole truth and nothing but the truth (count me out) will freak out about the biopic liberties taken. I didn’t care about that part, at least until the final scene, in which Jobs and his Harvard daughter reconcile over dad’s promise to invent the iPod someday soon. At the time Jobs was married with three more children, and Lisa had lived with her dad for several of her teen years. Whatever; Sorkin owes no one the facts, simply his own idea of what makes a compelling fictionalized version of Steve Jobs.
The movie, a formidable technical and design achievement, has everything going for it except a sense of Jobs’ inner life. On the other hand, with a charismatic actor on the order of Fassbender staring off into the middle distance in between hissy fits, communing with the gods of tech and commerce, the whirligig of an outer life may be enough.
