In today’s day and age, it’s easy to get blindsided by the showman ship and the frivolity of the technology that so frequently flaunts it metal bits in our faces. Digital watches, smart phones, smart houses, security systems, and many many more types of technological advancements that have all come to our tiny, fragile human hands in the last two decades. And arguably the man to thank for starting the technology re-revolution in the tail end of the 20th century is Steve Jobs. Some will disagree, but many regard him as the father of the modern technological age, at least in terms of accessibility to the public.
“Steve Jobs,” the film, does not regard him as a godlike figure that should be idolized by every keyboard monkey on the planet. The film treats him like many people say he was outside of the public eye. To put it bluntly, he was an asshole. Jobs was someone who was treated as a visionary but was pretty mean to most of the people he worked with. He thought he was ‘hot shit,’ and that his opinions and visions on the products mattered more than the people designing them, building them, programing them, or paying for them.
Granted, this could be what made him a genius in his own right, but the film attempts to show him as honestly as possible, and it largely succeeds, although it succeeds more so in being an enjoyable character piece, than it does an honest retelling of Steve’s life. The film is directed by Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “127 Hours”) and it has such a palpable and unique shooting style. At one moment you are twisting through the air and in another it’s a simple, straight forward scene between two actors.
Yet every moment, the screen lights up with these performances. Michael Fassbender (“Inglorious Bastards,” “Shame”) is compelling and dickish in his portrayal of Jobs, and an unrecognizable Kate Winslet (“Titanic,” “Revolutionary Road”) is just as terrific, if not slightly better, as his confidant, assistant, and closest-thing-to-a-best-friend-he-has Joanna Hoffman. The rest of the cast is also excellent; Seth Rogen (“Pineapple Express,” “50/50”) is charming and has this joy to him as he plays a man who was, and is, always excited about the power of technology in Steve Wozniak. Michael Stuhlberg (“Lincoln,” “Hitchcock”) is engaging as Andy Hertzfeld, Jeff Daniels is calculating warm presence, and Katherine Waterson (“Michael Clayton,” “Inherent Vice”) is sympathetic and at the same time infuriated as Chrisann Brennan, the mother of Steve’s estranged daughter.
The film plays out like a stage play, with scenes that lack a lot of pomp and circumstance that you typically equate with big Hollywood films, even big Hollywood biopics, and that is thanks to its writer, Aaron Sorkin, the legend behind The West Wing, both the stage play and the film adaptation of A Few Good Men, The Newsroom, and The Social Network. His writing is pitch perfect, but a lot of that comes from the actors as well, who all work together like clockwork to make the words click and the characters connect.
But the film isn’t about Steve launching a product, or his fights with Woz. It’s about his daughter, and Steve’s refusal to accept his parentage. It’s about how a man can create so many great things without actually being great himself. And it’s about how we humans love computers so much, because they don’t have arguably the biggest flaw humanity does; arrogance.
The film is a study on the human condition, our need to be desired and to have what we want. And how when we get it, we realize how wrong we really were. Steve Jobs is a film about a man and his Lisa. Although, not the computer Apple made from the 80’s, the Lisa I’m talking about, is his daughter. Beautifully shot, acted, scripted, and scored, Steve Jobs is a simple film, about a man, what he created, and why none of it mattered without his original Lisa. 4.5/5