Steve Jobs **** (2015, Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Michael Stuhlbarg) – Movie Review

Danny Boyle‘s 2015 movie casts Michael Fassbender as the architect of the digital revolution, Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple inc. Let’s be clear, this isn’t a biopic of Jobs. Instead it paints a vivid portrait of the man, a genius perhaps, but a difficult man, who didn’t so much fly to extremes as live there. His peers were both fiercely loyal to him and greatly damaged and hurt by his unreasonable behaviour.

Of course it was just business, and about the biggest business there is. Hence our interest in the man, who emerges as some kind of 21st century Citizen Kane type, ie the none-too-likeable anti-hero. That gives Fassbender a head start and a challenge. Orson Welles managed to make the millionaire newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane strangely sympathetic, despite letting his gifts destroy his ethics, and Fassbender does a similar kind of thing with Jobs in his own intense, uncompromising way. It’s a brilliant performance by Fassbender, who bit by bit melds into Jobs. By the third act, he is Jobs.

Aaron (West Wing) Sorkin’s tasty screenplay, based in the book by Walter Isaacson, presents a show in three distinct acts. It could easily be a stage play or a TV drama, and in one way it is quite stagey, but Boyle works hard to turn it into a slick, posh, cinematic movie.

It unfolds backstage at three iconic product launches: (1) the last half hour before the unveiling of the first Macintosh computer in 1984; (2) the launch of the doomed NeXT computer in 1988; and (3) the unveiling of the iMac  in 1998. The screenplay is full of acid lines and razor sharp, even better than his The Social Network.

Yet the first act is the best, so good that it makes the subsequent acts feel less compelling than they really are. It’s Fassbender and his developing performance that keep you so involved.

The other roles are decently written but less rewarding, though Jeff Daniels is remarkable as Jobs’s boss John Sculley, and Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Michael Stuhlbarg do well as marketing manager Joanna Hoffman, Jobs’s passed-over best buddy Steve Wozniak and his colleague Andy Hertzfeld.

It was quite expensive for such a small-scale film – $30million – and lit no fires at the American box office, taking only $16.6million. But, hopefully, it should do much better in Europe, where many of us are prepared to sit and listen to rapid-fire dialogue, and cope with paying attention to a none-too-likeable main character. And, if there’s any justice, Oscar nominations for Sorkin, Fassbender and Daniels would be good.

It is impossible to say if this is the whole truth. But it is a grown-up movie that leaves you with food for thought as well as emotionally drained and prompted to do better with your own life. How many movies can claim to do that?

It won two 2016 Golden Globes for Aaron Sorkin’s Best Screenplay and Kate Winslet’s Best Supporting Actress.

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© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 3045

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