Steve Jobs (2015)
Directed by Danny Boyle
Set backstage at three iconic product launches and ending in 1998 with the unveiling of the iMac, Steve Jobs takes us behind the scenes of the digital revolution to paint an intimate portrait of the brilliant man at its epicenter.
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What critics compared Steve Jobs to
After having had a hand in writing some of moviedom’s most memorable screenplays (A Few Good Men, The Social Network , and Steve Jobs , among others), Sorkin is making his directorial debut with Molly’s Game, an adaptation of the true-life (with names changed) memoir of “Poker Princess” Molly Bloom.
Sorkin’s typically verbose script, including a mile-a-minute voiceover from Chastain that lasts for the film’s entire 140-minute running time and ensures that the script must have rivaled War and Peace in length, gives its female protagonist more dialogue than likely all of the female characters in Sorkin’s other feature film scripts (The Social Network, Moneyball, Steve Jobs and so on) combined.
From the fractured geniuses of “The Social Network” and “Steve Jobs,” to the data driven obsession of the Oakland A’s general manager in “Moneyball,” to the news anchor eager to shake up the system in “The Newsroom,” the screenwriter has crafted singular portraits of those who eagerly want not just success, but the power to implement their unorthodox ideas, and the space to reshape the conventions around them.
These later scenes hark back to some of the lesser sequences in Sorkin’s “Steve Jobs” script.
And then there’s the Daddy Thing, harkening back to Sorkin’s script for Steve Jobs — which ended up being more about Sorkin’s own paternal insecurities than Jobs’s.
Sorkin has made a specialty of finding ways to tell dense and complicated stories about fascinating real-life contemporary figure — Moneyball, The Social Network and Steve Jobs all qualify — and here he takes on his first female heroine, if that she is: Molly Bloom, a fearsomely sharp woman who, her U.S. Ski Team potential thwarted by a freak injury and law school abandoned, hits Los Angeles and is soon running one of the most illustrious poker games in town.
Despite the father-daughter subplot becoming the script's most heavy-handed element, Perla Haney-Jardine (2007's " Spider-Man 3 ") is a standout as 19-year-old Lisa, striking achingly truthful beats even as the when, where and how of their climactic interaction rings resoundingly false."Steve…
Jobs, whose own adoption caused him great turmoil, confounded those around him by his denial of Lisa (played at 9 by Ripley Sobo, "Winter's Tale") and 19 by (Perla Haney-Jardine, "Spider-Man 3"), the latter two pointing towards the development of the iPod).
That was the case with “Steve Jobs” (2015), which unfolded the creation myth of Apple; with “The Founder” (2016), which did the same for McDonald’s; with “Tetris,” now on Apple TV+; with the upcoming “BlackBerry,” which is not, alas, about the harvesting of soft fruits; and with “Joy” (2015), which gave us our first chance—pray God it not be our last—to watch Jennifer Lawrence trying her hardest to sell mops.
I’m thinking about Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs (2015) or the BBC’s Sherlock, both of which leave a trail of broken women behind their titular heroes.
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At one point, he condenses an entire act into a meaningless light show that recalls the worst moments of “Steve Jobs” in how it reduces profound human emotions into the stuff of raw stimuli.
Boyle acquits himself decently enough here as well, though I felt he was doing more to service the voice of Curtis’ writing even more so than with Sorkin on Steve Jobs .
Director Danny Boyle ( Slumdog Millionaire , Steve Jobs ) and screenwriter Richard Curtis ( Love Actually , Four Weddings and a Funeral ) are frankly confecting a sweet little fable here, and they would probably sigh and roll their eyes at any attempted nitpicking.
Boyle has long excelled at injecting music-video surrealism into his feature films, from the kinetic Trainspotting to the symphonic Steve Jobs .
While not as dark or scathing as Josie and the Pussycats , the satire here feels less specific to music and how companies launch product, not surprising considering Danny Boyle’s underrated Steve Jobs film.