Steve Jobs review – decoding a complex character

It is traditional to attribute titular possession of a movie to the director, but although Danny Boyle’s quick-witted spirit is evident in every frame of this home-computing parable about a man who cares more for machines than people, this is still very much “Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs”. With its boldly theatrical three-act structure, bravura ensemble cast (a Boyle trademark since the days of Shallow Grave) and alluring visual pizzazz, the film is a tightly choreographed treat defined by clean lines both narrative and visual, a perfect synthesis of writing, performance and direction.

Yet while Boyle, like his subject, may be the visionary who understands how to present this potentially bamboozling material to the public, it is screenwriter Sorkin who provides the dramatic source code. From the trademark quickfire walk-and-talk dialogue (Boyle calls it a “standing-up movie”) to the slick sociopolitical satire, this runs on Sorkin software.

Playing out over the course of three product launches – the original Apple Macintosh in 1984, the cuboid NeXT Computer in 88 and the stylish iMac in 98 – Steve Jobs is a thematic companion piece to Sorkin’s The Social Network and was indeed originally slated to share its director, David Fincher. Both are stories of brittle whizz kids who spy a technological opening in the public marketplace that they then exploit with quasi-missionary zeal. Recurrent too is a reliance upon the support of a less charismatic partner who is snubbed as success comes calling: Andrew Garfield’s Facebook wingman Eduardo Saverin, and Seth Rogen’s tech-savvy Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak.

Most significantly, both The Social Network and Steve Jobs focus on men who precipitate quantum shifts in the science of human interaction while signally failing to communicate with the women in their lives – Mark Zuckerberg’s dramatic estrangement from girlfriend Erica Albright mirrored and amplified in Jobs’s abandonment of former partner Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston) and denial of their disputed daughter, Lisa.

Ironically, there is a woman at the centre of Jobs’s life and, indeed, the centre of this film; marketing chief Joanna Hoffman, who serves as both conscience and confidante as her boss bullies his way through a series of pre-launch backstage bust-ups. Brilliantly, we don’t see these presentations, only the rock star build-up (stamping feet, Mexican waves) in a series of increasingly imposing auditoriums, San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House in which Boyle pointedly stages Jobs’s planned Phantom-style revenge on Apple, the company from which he was ousted in ’85.

There’s a delicious irony to the fact that Jobs insisted upon making computers whose workings were infuriatingly inaccessible, yet Sorkin’s narrative plays out entirely amid the messy inner wirings that he hoped to make impenetrable. Within this short-circuiting landscape, Kate Winslet makes Hoffman the most imposing (and indeed likable) presence on screen, her European vowels and frosty efficiency hiding a warmth and humanity that are elsewhere in short supply. In a world of artificial intelligence in which men argue about the importance of getting a computer to say “Hello” on stage, Hoffman is the voice of calm who reminds us that while the HAL 9000 computer had impeccable electronic manners, it also tried to kill the cast of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Efficiently signalling the changes between the narrative’s shifting time periods, director of photography Alwin H Küchler (with whom Boyle worked closely on the underrated Sunshine) moves from the grainy texture of 16mm stock through the rich gloss of 35mm to the too-sharp resolution of digital, the film’s face evolving with its products. At the centre of this evolution is Michael Fassbender, who achieves the extraordinary feat of making Jobs not only believable but tolerable, breathing life into a character less able to mimic human responses than his misfiring machines. Both Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio were once earmarked for this role, but it’s hard to imagine either of them matching Fassbender’s capacity to engage and repel simultaneously. We are at once appalled by Jobs’ denial of his daughter, yet somehow swayed by Sorkin’s sympathetic suggestion that his own adoption was the traumatic key to both his success and failure.

How “true” any of this is remains a moot point. Although the credits acknowledge Walter Isaacson’s densely researched book, several of Jobs’s associates have insisted that the film does not represent the man they knew. No matter. Like the Mark Zuckerberg of The Social Network, this Steve is very much the creation of his writer; if we find truth in the drama (as I do), then that truth belongs to Sorkin.