Review: ” Steve Jobs” Starring Michael Fassbender

This review is also available at CinemaRetro

By Mark Cerulli

Full disclosure:  I’m a Mac evangelist and have been since the 1980s. (The boxy Macintosh Plus was the first model I used.) I idolized Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and this brilliant movie from director Danny Boyle doesn’t change that. What it does do is explain Jobs as much as a force of nature like Steve Jobs can be explained. The film, written by Aaron Sorkin, tells Jobs’ story through three pivotal product launches –1984’s Macintosh, the ill-fated Next in 1988 and his triumphant 1998 return with the revolutionary iMac. Most of the action takes place in the tension-filled backstage crucible before each event, where Jobs terrorizes staffers and programmers and deals with the inconvenient truth of a very dependent ex-girlfriend (played by Sam Waterston’s daughter, Katherine) who is also the mother of his child. A child he refuses to acknowledge, conclusive paternity test or no.

Michael Fassbender is nothing short of amazing as Jobs, a man so convinced of his own rightness that he can’t acknowledge a shred of humanity or empathy. Although Fassbender doesn’t look like the mercurial tech rockstar, he’s able to channel him. Kate Winslett turns in another stellar performance as Jobs’ harried marketing chief, the one woman he does confide in – as much as Jobs was capable of confiding. Seth Rogan puts his usual stoner persona aside as the real brains behind Apple, co-founder Steve Wozniak. “Woz” is seemingly Jobs only friend but his relentless perfectionism pushes their relationship to the limit.

Flashbacks illustrate major points in Jobs’ career –the birth of Apple in a silicon valley garage, wooing Pepsi head John Scully (Jeff Daniels) to be Apple’s CEO, and the crushing boardroom battle where the indispensable Jobs suddenly found out that he was totally dispensable. Along the way Jobs hints at the reasons behind his iron will and propensity to lash out at anyone who doesn’t live up to his impossible standards – rejection by his first set of adoptive parents who literally gave him back. Instead of coming to grips with it through therapy or discussion, he walled it off, along with most human emotions.

Cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler’s tight camerawork is centered on the actors moving through various backstage settings as the product launch tensions ramp up and ever so slightly, Jobs acknowledges the fatherhood he’s denied. Sorkin’s Oscar-bait dialogue crackles throughout. For example…

Jobs to a stressed-out engineer: “You had three weeks, the universe was created in a third of that.”

The stressed-out engineer: “Well, someday you’ll have to tell us how you did it.”

Because Apple products are so ubiquitous and four years after his death, Jobs has passed into legend; we think we know him. We think he’s ours. But behind the iconic products, there was an intense, ruthless and occasionally cruel man. This film helps explain why and does what Jobs himself never could – it helps humanize him.

Steve Jobs opens October 9th from Universal Pictures.