A Word about "Steve Jobs" (2015)

Dir. Danny Boyle

Scr. Aaron Sorkin

Pro. Danny Boyle, Guymon Casady, Christian Colson, Mark Gordon, Scott Rudin

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels

Steve Jobs, among other things, was famously devoted to yoga in his life. What reason did he have for doing so? Why, also, was he recorded washing his feet in toilet water? Michael Fassbender performed both of these actions in his showcase of Steve Jobs (2015), but it is tough to understand what these things truly indicate about him.

It is impossible to showcase the entirety of a person, let alone a Great Man, in a finite medium. But we try anyway, searching for the center of these remarkable people in our wider culture. Some methods are well-suited to the task, and some are less than ideal. Biographies can span whatever length the author wants, stretching one’s accomplishments over multiple volumes, if necessary. The only thing stopping the author is his vision and the publishing costs. A film, on the other hand, is dependent on its runtime being relatively short. Covering every key moment of a Great Man’s life through one film would be like trying to build a computer without an OS. The product seems functional, but the heart isn’t there.

Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin know better than to attempt such a thing, so they dedicated themselves to just the first half of the tech mogul’s public life. Starting at the Macintosh launch and ending with the iMac’s unveiling, Steve Jobs’s creators instead focused on presenting him at three crucial stages in his career, condensing their vision into a handful of key characters and locations. We return again and again to Fassbender and Kate Winslet’s Joanna Hoffman, Apple’s marketing executive and Jobs’ closest confidant, in the handful of minutes left before each product launch. Other reoccurring characters include Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), the Apple II co-creator who states to Jobs that one can be “decent and gifted at the same time”; John Sculley, the Apple CEO who regularly confronts the icon’s obsession with control and image; and his family, Chrisann Brennan and his daughter Lisa (Katherine Waterson and Perla Haney-Jardine), who demonstrate the life Jobs has outside these Californian convention halls, with a family he can’t connect with and the love he both refuses and demands from them.

Sorkin and Boyle are never hampered by these three main settings for the film. The thunderous stomping of the San Francisco Opera House enlivens the ears. The editing whips the film from era to era with a swoosh of news bulletins. The camera is creative and untethered, matched with a Daniel Pemberton score that gives each act an orchestra befitting the film’s many ages and stages. But as the film left off, I understood more about who Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) was as a person than the title character. Jobs is but a demo for the essence of Steve. But, in the spirit of NeXT, it was masterfully presented.