The Steve Jobs Movie

I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan. I think The Social Network is a brilliant piece of film. I own an iPhone despite not being a Mac person. I think Michael Fassbender is darn-near perfect ever since he played Mr. Rochester. I think Kate Winslet is magnificent nearly all the time (even when she has to make pie with an escaped convict). And I think Danny Boyle is generally okay (decidedly indifferent towards Slumdog Millionaire but think 127 Hours is marvelous). So I was pretty stoked for Steve Jobs.

Sorkin stages the movie in three acts, each covering the moments leading up to a launch of something that will (or not) change the world: the Macintosh computer, the black cube NeXT, and the iMac. Each of the acts is shot differently: the first on 16 mm, the second wide-screen 35 mm, and the last in high-def. Yes, what a filmmaker chooses to shoot on (film or digital) and the camera and film they choose make a difference (can we agree that film is art?).

Fassbender is an actor I feel can do no wrong since he played Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre a few years ago. He completely owns the role of Steve Jobs, which is difficult because he is a known figure who passed away not that long ago. People remember him. But he does it and I can't take my eyes off him during the movie. Kate Winslet plays his Director of Marketing over the years and the only person he takes crap from. She calls herself his "work wife" and she is pretty much awesome.

There is an electric scene in the second act between Jobs and his mentor/father figure, John Sculley, played by Jeff Daniels (who is a Sorkin constant, and was also in the recently-released The Martian). The film cuts between an argument they are having in the present and in the past when Jobs was removed from Apple. It is breathtaking, with its cuts between the arguments fuzzying the line between past and present. The actors knock it out of the park.

What I liked about the film is that it wasn't the standard-issue biopic movie-about-someone-we-all-know. Instead of covering the entire life of Steve Jobs, we get these three snippets that let us see various aspects of Steve Jobs and the people in his life. Much like Lincoln covered just a small period in the President's life, as opposed to, say, Walk the Line  which gives us the entire life of Johnny Cash, this choice provides the audience with just a taste of the person. I mean, we don't even see Jobs' wife or kids (other than the child he originally refused to acknowledge as his, Lisa). We don't need to see his childhood or his counterculture years leading up to the founding of Apple. A good filmmaker and screenwriter lets those aspects become a part of the present-day person without having to show it to us. And in this case, Sorkin and Boyle have done just that.