Review | Steve Jobs

"It's not binary, did you know? You can have a gift and be decent at the same time“.

This phrase, so timely spoken by Steve Wozniak, in 1998, in the city of San Francisco, on the eve of the launch of the computer iMac, and addressed to your friend and creative partner Steve Jobs, the founder of the computer giant Apple, perfectly sums up the simple complexity of Jobs' persona and life itself, an individual of unique genius, in eternal battle with his belligerent and uncompromising personality.

It is this enigmatic personality that Steve Jobs (USA, UK, 2015), film impeccably directed by Danny Boyle (Who wants to be a millionaire), colossally written by Aaron Sorkin (The social network) and carried out with extreme competence for the increasingly better Michael Fassbender (Macbeth: Ambition and War) seeks to decipher, at the same time as it opens the indisputable ferocity and self-confidence of the man who, without a doubt, transformed the world in which we live today.

The production is structured around three key moments in Jobs' personal and professional trajectory: 1984, on the eve of the launch of Apple's first personal computer, the Macintosh; 1988, year of the launch of the computer Next, Jobs' solo project after his resignation from Apple, after the failure of sales of the computer he had created in '84; and 1998, on the eve of the launch of the iMac, a project that marked Jobs's return to Apple and which consolidated him as the computer genius that we came to know until his death, victim of pancreatic cancer, in 2011, at the age of 56.

Intermingling these capital events in Jobs' life, Sorkin's magnanimous script (undoubtedly one of the best and most complex ever filmed at all times), portrays in a dynamic (but excessively verbose) way, Steve's relations with the characters of day-to-day life, as his former endeavor partner Steve Wozniak (the comedian Seth Rogen, showing he knows how to act), his former boss John Sculley (Jeff Daniels, in Débi & Lídio 2), his faithful chief engineer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg, in Men in Black 3), his loyal assistant and handyman Joanna (Kate Winslet, in Intimate Sins), in addition to the problematic Chrisann (the beautiful Katherine Waterston, in Inherent Addiction), the mother of Jobs' only daughter, Lisa, played at three different times by Ripley Sobo and Makenzie Moss, and also by the young Brazilian Perla Haney-Jardine (Kill Bill Vol. 2). In all these interfaces, the technical dynamism of Sorkin's script shines, in addition to Boyle's always bold direction (here more discreet than usual).

Unlike most critics and the press, I do not consider JOBS, film released in 2013, directed by Joshua Michael Stern and starring Ashton Kutcher, a really bad production. But just 10 minutes of Boyle's film is enough to visualize the abysmal difference between his production and the one directed by Stern. Steve Jobs give a bath! Sorkin's text is so intelligent and complex that, at times, it reaches cinematic perfection. As if the text and the direction were not enough, the editing work done by Elliot Graham (in Trash: Hope Comes from the Trash) is also worth mentioning. One sequence in particular, in which Jobs interacts with John Sculley in two different periods, but shown simultaneously, is of such an overwhelming competence, which, by itself, would deserve a standing ovation. In this, and in several other moments of the production, Boyle's sure direction and the talent of his exquisite cast shine, especially, of course, his protagonist Michael Fassbender, absolutely irreproachable.

Even so, Steve Jobs it's not an easy movie. The excess of dialogues and the very few cuts demand a lot of effort from the viewer, who takes a while to absorb the excess of information that arrives bombing all the time. But this is exactly the essence of Steve Jobs himself. A differentiated being, sometimes genius, but whose talent for business did not add to his personal life, full of resentments, unresolved relationships and many failures in communication. By creating so many tools to bring people closer and closer, Jobs, somehow, distanced himself from them and, while facilitating human communication, he couldn't cross the borders of his own family life. Perhaps it was the price to pay for genius. Genius that arrives extremely well translated to cinema, by the talented hands of Boyle, Sorkin and Fassbender, in an absolutely necessary film.

See Steve Jobs' full sheet and cast.

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