Grade: B
In one of my reviews from last year, this is what I had to say about the biopic, a genre which usually has an uphill battle with me.
“You make a movie about somebody, show only what you want your audience to see, and when you end it is arbitrary and inconsequential, as long as you conclude the film with captions on the screen that say what ends up happening to everybody. And voila, you have your typical biopic.”
I have completed my Michael Fassbender Title Character Double Feature tonight with Steve Jobs, which I found to be one of the better biopics I’ve seen. The score is beautiful when it needs to be, haunting when it needs to be, and finds cool ways to punctuate, comment on, and drive the dialogue. It is everything a movie score should be. The screenplay may be the sharpest I’ve come across this year. I was tempted to spend this space quoting my favorite one-liners. There is a moment toward the end, when Steve’s 19-year-old daughter asks him why he kept insisting he wasn’t her father for so many years. The three-word response he gives is sad, honest, courageous, heartbreaking, hopeful, and tear-inducing all rolled into one. This is a line that will resonate with me.
David Fincher was originally slated to direct this film – a prospect that I was excited about. The honors ended up going to Danny Boyle (Trainspotting), yet there were touches here that reminded me of bits from my favorite Fincher films. The music, in both sound and usage, made me think of The Social Network and Gone Girl. I also sensed an always-welcome Oliver Stone influence. Boyle did admirable work here.
Performances are gripping and effective across the board. After playing the blandest Macbeth I’ve ever seen, Fassbender attacks the role of Steve Jobs with fervor and gusto. I don’t think I’ve ever seen footage of the real life Jobs, but either way, Fassbender’s performance didn’t feel like a shallow SNL-type imitation, which can be a slippery slope in biopics. I saw a fleshed-out character. Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels, and Seth Rogen make memorable impressions as well. Refreshingly absent here are those blasted post-movie captions that spoon-feed us a forced epilogue. Really, it’s just a couple of quibbles that prevent me from giving this the “plus” version of my rating below. A few plot points made me question whether they played out that way in real life, or were dramatized and “blown up” to make for entertaining cinema – and Steve’s Grinch-like change of heart at the end likely didn’t happen so abruptly, like we see here. Also, the movie would tend to “lose” me a few times during some extended scenes of computer mumbo jumbo. It’s not perfect, but as Dustin Hoffman said in Wag the Dog, “when it’s cooking, it’s cooking.”
Grade: B
Film Reviews by Mark 
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