STEVE JOBS Movie Review – A Lighter Version of ‘The Social Network’

Steve Jobs opens across the country this Friday, October 23, 2015 following a limited release to select cities on October 9. This means that while he won’t necessarily lie to tell the story, certain manipulation, exaggeration, and dramatization is needed to make this kind of film. I suppose that it’s best described as a series of three vignettes, each taking place backstage just before Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) is to give a keynote address at a new product launch: The first in 1984, before the unveiling of the Macintosh, the second in 1988 before the unveiling of the NeXT cube, and finally in 1998 before the unveiling of the iMac. “Throughout these stages are an array of recurring characters including stellar performances from Jobs” right-hand woman/marketing director Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan), chief engineer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlberg) and Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels).

Steve Jobs is very much a companion piece to Sorkin’s The Social Network. These events and moments all connect so tidily that they are certainly not true to life.

Danny Boyle also handles the source material well and gives the film a much needed solid direction, as a movie about literally three events goes for 122-minutes, and never for a moment feels boring. Her mother Chrisann (Katherine Waterston) and Jobs were never married and during Lisa’s early years he denied being her father. It’s less a movie, in the traditional sense, and more a portrait composed of moving pictures, and presents a stunning and creative new approach to biographical filmmaking.

Unfortunately, Lisa’s character is not developed at all in the movie, so it is hard to feel connected to the story when she just pops up and says a couple of words here and there. Jobs’ life is well-known to many, from the improbable heights and depths of his storied career to his personal struggles with friends, co-workers and even his own family. Apple’s CEO, John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), voices doubts about whether the Macintosh can deliver all Jobs promises. She sees him in all of his roles and at both his best and worst. Her role is subtle because she must be a person capable of managing a dramatic egomaniac.

“I like to write them as if they’re making their case to God as to why they should be allowed into Heaven”. He did take the time to consult the major people being portrayed in the film, aside from Jobs, and received major feedback.

New films about Steve Jobs, jazz great Miles Davis and wire-walker Philippe Petit – and slightly older ones about musician Brian Wilson and the FBI’s infamous Abscam sting – implicitly offer themselves up as real without adhering to a strict version of reality.

It seems that his passion made him a flawless pain in the butt. Danny Boyle’s “Steve Jobs” fulfilled all the expectations of a successful biopic, or rather, biodrama.

The computer, in tests, won’t say, “Hello”, a stunt crucial to the launch, at least in Jobs’ mind. He came up with a way, and it fits the three-act structure, which every story is based upon. Callbacks to music, anecdotes, and art all reveal the aging process and how a few have handled it more gracefully than others.

He said Universal wasn’t wrong to pick up the film from Sony.

Make no mistake about it: the Jobs you will discover in this movie is close to the real thing, even if the conversations created by Sorkin are pure fiction. In my professional life, I have always used Macs, and ever since Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, I have been a slave to it. However, when the time arrived to invest in a tablet, I decided not to put all my electronic eggs in the Apple basket and got myself a BlackBerry PlayBook and shifted soon enough to a series of Android tablets. None of that work is there though, and the final 10 minutes is completely unearned.

“You are not going to get a unanimous response to anything”, he said.

Steve Jobs throws off the typical follies of biopics for a great film until it stumbles and falls right at the finish line.