Film Review: ‘Steve Jobs’ grasps bits of fiction from real life
Danny Boyle’s new “Steve Jobs” is at least the third movie about the Apple co-founder to be released since his death. Ashton Kutcher played Jobs in Joshua Michael Stern’s 2013 biopic “Jobs,” and Alex Gibney’s documentary “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” came out a few months ago. Both of these had their virtues, but Boyle’s is on an entirely different level.
It may be inappropriate to compare “Steve Jobs” to Gibney’s documentary, but Stern’s biopic provides an instructive comparison. It was competent and chronological, a checklist of important events in Jobs’ personal and professional lives.
Boyle and Aaron Sorkin — who wrote the screenplay — leave out a lot. We never hear about Jobs’ relationships with Pixar and Disney (of which he was by far the biggest stockholder) or his legal troubles with the government or the cancer that cost him his life. Most notably, while Jobs’ relationship with ex-girlfriend Chrisann and daughter Lisa is at the movie’s center, there is no hint that Jobs married and had three other children.
Another seeming advantage the earlier movie had was the casting of Ashton Kutcher, who had a similar build and slight facial resemblance to Jobs. Michael Fassbender, the new Jobs, is too large, too conventionally handsome, and too, well, grown-up-looking. Yes, he is only a few years older than Jobs in the middle part of the movie, and is even a few years younger in the final part. But “old” is a little different than “grown-up.” It may be partly a generational thing and or a cultural delusion on my part, but boomers whose formative years were touched by what (for lack of a better word) could be called “the counterculture” may look their age, but they tend not to look like grown-ups. Fassbender probably looked more grown up at 25 than Jobs at 45.
If Fassbender’s surface is less apt than Kutcher’s, he nonetheless takes the character and runs away with it. His performance is constantly compelling; in addition, Boyle and Sorkin have chosen a blatantly artificial way to tell the story. What they accomplish is a reminder of how art and artifice can produce a stronger reality than newsreels and most documentaries.
Structurally, one might say that “Steve Jobs” reveals its live theater origins ... or it would if it had any. In classic stage fashion, Sorkin’s screenplay has three acts that transpire (more or less) in real time — each representing the forty minutes before Jobs is due on stage for a major product rollout. In 1984, he is presenting the first Macintosh; in 1988 the NeXT; and in 1998 the iMac.
In each act, he interacts with the same six characters, some of whom are not exactly welcome at such a high-pressure moment: ex-girlfriend Chrisann (Katherine Waterston); their daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and Perla Haney-Jardine, at 5, 9, and 19, respectively); old collaborator Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen); Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels); engineer and friend Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg); and absolutely essential assistant Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet).
Chrisann is pleading for financial support from the gazillionaire Jobs for her and the daughter he initially refuses to acknowledge. Wozniak is asking Jobs to simply give a quick shout-out to the leaders of the old Apple II team (which he repeatedly refuses to do). And Joanna is running around, coordinating the madness and trying to patch up the crises caused by Jobs’ stubbornness and self-absorption.
Even though the action only departs from time and place during flashbacks — some of them only seconds long — the whole breakneck pace feels a bit like Michael Frayn’s play “Noises Off”: a cross between a thriller, a slamming-doors bedroom farce (without the sex or infatuation), and a frenetic Howard Hawks film like “His Girl Friday.” Both the setting and the constantly moving SteadiCam also inevitably evoke “Birdman.”
The entire cast is first-rate, but by definition it’s Fassbender’s show. Most of the time, his Jobs is (as many associates claim) charming, but also obsessed, insensitive and coldhearted. The character shows signs of softening toward the end; while these moments are emotionally welcome, they are also the least convincing.
Boyle, Sorkin, and Fassbender are trying to give us not a “real” portrait of Jobs so much as a “true” one. But, even more than that, they have created an artificial, high-speed entertainment from the complexities of a famous life.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).