I have to admit, I went into Steve Jobs with a certain amount of trepidation. I’m fairly opposed to the Hollywood-standard
method of translating the complexities of famous people’s lives into a three
act structure by cramming their entire Wikipedia summary into a three-act
narrative. Thankfully, director Danny
Boyle and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin are smart and talented enough where that
hasn’t turned out to be an issue for the second Jobs-centric biopic in two
years. No, what the duo have created is
a very impressive character study that neither lionizes nor entirely demonizes
the controversial Apple CEO.
They avoid this pitfall by working with an unusual
structure. The film’s three acts take
place across the backstage preparation of three pivotal product launching
events: the Macintosh in 1984; after Jobs was fired from Apple, the NeXT in
1988; and after being rehired as CEO, the iMac in 1998. In the build-up to these enormous events,
Jobs (Michael Fassbender) can be seen managing his fragile social circule, including a condescending
friendship with Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan in role perfectly cast), a
crumbling bond with his mentor John Scully (Jeff Daniels), and a
relationship with a daughter he refuses to acknowledge as his own, aged five, nine, and nineteen in the respective
years/acts. Each of these sequences
ends before the launch presentation actually begins, with the events of the time gaps
explained through archival news footage.
Though the gimmick is somewhat transparent, particularly with how Jobs
must meet with each of the important people in his life in each act as if going
down a checklist, it works primarily as a method to keep us from being bogged
down with the parts of Jobs’s life inconsequential to telling this story.
It is Sorkin’s writing that really holds the entire thing together, with a slow burning tension that rises gradually before each launch
event that only continues when the catharsis of seeing the launch is denied to
us. Yet there is always room for a relieving comic witticism when most needed, which keeps the film from becoming overwhelming. This is to say nothing of how Danny Boyle’s
direction capitalizes on such writing, keeping focus on Jobs to have us
piggyback on his emotions, which not only serves to make him relatable, but
also to show us a complex portrait of a troubled man.
And what a portrait it paints. Fassbender may not look much like Jobs, but
he gets the man’s mannerisms down pat and does a great job of differentiating
Jobs’s stage presence from his real personality without becoming cartoonishly
exaggerated. And the way that Sorkin
writes Jobs, he is very clearly a narcissistic and petty person, using and
abusing the people around him. But he
isn’t all bad. He clearly pushes people
away because he’s afraid of the weakness that may foster in him, and his
constant quest for perfection and societal justification for his amoral
behavior makes him at least intriguing if not sympathetic. It’s a complex representation that is likely
to earn Fassbender a well-deserved Oscar nomination (as little as such a nomination can actually mean in relation to an actor’s talent).
The film’s final moments delve a little too far into the saccharine
for my tastes, choosing to end on a idolizing note that the film has clearly
demonstrated that Jobs doesn’t deserve.
However, this is a minor gripe in a film that managed to keep me engaged
the whole way through, largely due to excellent acting, fantastic writing, and
astute direction. This may be one of the
only biopics that actually deserves to find its way into critical top ten lists
this year. Check it out.
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