But mostly, Jobs spends his final pre-launch moments conducting combative, compulsively chatty showdowns with all the key people in his life.
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“He called me three times, having nothing to do with this movie”. I’m inclined to think the latter.
“Steve Jobs” is a blast of a time, while still being enriched in dramatic heft and historical accuracy.
Even though she is, even though he knows she is, even though she knows he is, even though a court has ordered him to pay support, Jobs refuses to acknowledge Lisa as his daughter; not just emotionally but financially. In the film, they address that Steve refused to believe he was the father of a girl, even when the paternity test revealed that there was a 94% chance that he was her father. Humiliating employees, alienating cofounder Steve Wozniak, and denying paternity of his daughter, Lisa. It has to, or else “Steve Jobs” wouldn’t be the complex character study that it is. It was as if the screenwriter was halfway done the script and realized they needed a few kind of storyline to tie all of the mismatching scenes together.
“Steve Jobs” hangs heavily, melodramatically, on his relationship with Lisa. This made it feel like the usual Hollywood cookie cutter ending, and Jobs was far from that. All of the movie’s most interesting frictions happen here. Buried deep in Michael Fassbender’s fascinating portrayal of Jobs is a sense of self-loathing coexisting with the man’s tyrannical egotism, although his psychological hangups – most notably, a feeling of insurmountable rejection tied to his being given up for adoption as a newborn – aren’t used as an easy excuse or explanation.
I loved the powerhouse acting in “Steve Jobs'”. The modern draw of biopics has been the performances-how deeply immersed in a character can an actor get?
Jobs also applies this “end-to-end control” to the people in his life, however, and the results are much less user-friendly. After seeing Jobs, I actually felt like I had a better understanding of Jobs’ infamous charisma. While learning nothing, I made several friends and we were all dismayed when one of them, an affable Nigerian lad, was shot dead by the police in a cinematic chase down M. G. Road after it turned out that he was a drug peddler.
For all its strengths, Steve Jobs doesn’t quite add up to a satisfying experience. There were several times while watching it that I noticed they used tracks that were obviously meant to build up anticipation. “I won’t be able to comment on the movie until after I see it”.
All of these movies champion men for their ability to do what Sorkin is so widely recognized – to think differently. Steve Jobs would reportedly need to make around $120 million to break even – an unlikely figure when you consider that it’s $7.3 million opening weekend is scarcely half-a-million more than Ashton Kutcher’s critically panned Jobs scored on its debut. Backstage, according to the movie at least, a real soap opera unfolded. Basically, his last sentence sums up my thoughts. “It’s the only thing in the movie that’s not in the script”, Sorkin told Conan O’Brien.
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The movie failed to utilize any of the actors to their full potential. After Christian Bale twice left the project and other stars from George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio to director David Fincher were briefly involved, Michael Fassbender finally played Jobs, giving an electrifying performance that invites an Oscar nom. With the film now playing in theatres across the US and Canada, a jet-lagged but eager Sorkin visited Toronto to talk about his work.
