Directed by Danny Boyle
Written by Aaron Sorkin
Starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, Seth Rogen, Katherine Waterston
Age difference between romantic leads: Even though they're not exactly romantic in the film, the only pairing are 3 years apart. Success!
Making a movie is all about intention. What do you hope to achieve by making this film? What do you want your audience to come away from your film thinking or feeling? You make an action film to thrill an audience, a comedy to make them laugh, and a documentary to teach people about a new area of life to be depressed about. When that movie is a biopic, the task becomes trickier still. You have the simple story that the director wants to tell, but then often there will be extra bits and pieces in there, things from that person's life that don't contribute to the central narrative and will simply be there because the director wants to show another aspect of the real life person's character. And then you get a film like Steve Jobs, which isn't really interested in telling a story at all.
This film is a peculiar beast. It centres on three separate product launches at Apple, across different time periods. Backstage, before the products are launched, Steve Jobs interacts with his ex-girlfriend, his daughter, employees, the co-founder of Apple, a marketing executive and the CEO of Apple. The stories that carry us through the film are flimsy for the most part, and the film ends up being 3 short plays, rather than 1 film. Had the script been written by anyone other than Aaron Sorkin (famed writer of the West Wing and most other things where people have long conversations whilst walking down corridors) I'm confident it never would have been made, both due to his stature and the trust and respect people have for him, and the fact that the dialogue is very well written and manages to keep the film entertaining.
The central performance of Michael Fassbender is terrific, giving us a somewhat sympathetic, but ultimately unlikeable character study of a man with iron-clad confidence in his ideas and visions. It's difficult to fault him for the work that he has done and the brand that he created, but it also adds credence to the belief that it's very difficult to be incredibly successful in business and not a dick. Seth Rogen and Jeff Daniels do well in parts that are comfortably within their respective comfort zones, and the often impressive Katherine Waterston manages to be unsympathetic whilst trying to get fair treatment for her daughter, without resorting to being a complete cartoon villain, which is not an easy task at all. Kate Winslet won a Golden Globe for her performance, which is... good without being spectacular, and features a Polish accent of varying severity (which is a small niggle, but one that I always find difficult to overlook).
Overall, this is a film that filmmaking teachers will be annoyed with, in that it breaks a lot of screenwriting rules, but still manages to be gripping. If the intention of the film was to tell the story of Steve Jobs' life, it fails. If the intention was to create a profile of the man, it succeeds admirably, and does so by being a testament to the power of great dialogue.