Also: Reviews
of movies “Steve Jobs,” “Rock the Kasbah,” “The Last Witch Hunter” and more.
“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.
Brennan has come at this dramatically opportune time to ask for a bump in child support. Meanwhile, Macintosh marketing wizard Joanna Hoffman (Winslet), Jobs’ de facto stage manager and resident truth-teller, hovers with a clipboard and a knack for undoing the damage done by Jobs’ every human interaction. She loves the man for his genius. Sorkin’s script, loosely based on Walter Isaacson’s biography, has no interest in completism; it telescopes and compresses and leaves things out, such as the cancer that ultimately claimed his life.
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. Apple will need the operating system; Jobs knows the Cube won’t sell, but it’s his leverage with the people who didn’t believe in him sufficiently, among them Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels). As in the first section of “Steve Jobs,” Jobs friend and colleague Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen, excellent in a one-and-a-half-note role) comes around to press for recognition of the Apple II team, something Jobs resists. 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. Sorkin’s equally ambitious but far wittier script for “The Social Network” was infinitely tougher on its subject, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. I’m not sure that’s why that film ended up stronger and more clear-eyed than “Steve Jobs,” but with this one, which cares no more for biographical facts than “The Social Network,” Sorkin’s exchanges often go nowhere, floridly.
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 dialogue has a theatrical zing, at its best; at its weakest, the thesis lines regarding Jobs’ need for “end-to-end control” in every aspect of his life and his product line get a little thick. “Go make a dent in the universe, Steven,” whispers Winslet at one point. Jobs did, but lines like that don’t help anybody’s cause. 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.