The script for Steve Jobs is the most graceful and magnetic thing Aaron Sorkin has ever written. I say this as a lifelong devotee of Sorkin’s mouthful-of-poetry style who even watches the bad stuff — like a junkie with cheap heroine — just to get a fraction of the high. He’s found a perfect match for his sensibilities in Jobs, the monolithic, ego-driven mad man who didn’t do anything except invent the future. Like The Social Network was an adolescent warm-up for the mature main course.
Yet he doesn’t cast the founder of Apple in bronze. He spends twice the amount of regulation screenplay pages beating down and venerating and exposing his flaws.
The first trailer for the movie plays up the bombastic edge of the drama. After all, big things are at stake. Entire companies, the pace of technology, the fate of the entire modern world (ahem). It puts us into the mindset of people who are charging everything up to eleven with immediacy because their existence hinges on how well one man can say a bunch of words to a crowd of people.
Michael Fassbender plays Jobs, who spends the entirety of the film preparing for three decade-separated speeches for innovative Apple projects, but the movie is built on the smaller moments he encounters during the adrenaline rush of the publicity machine. Steve Jobs is directed by Danny Boyle, and the rest of the cast includes Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and Jeff Daniels, so it’s not a matter of whether it will be nominated for awards, but how many. It’s getting a jump on prestige season by hitting theaters October 9th.
In a way, I’m sad that David Fincher ultimately left the project, but Boyle is stellar, and it allows yet another director to take on Sorkin’s words, which offers everyone an excuse to binge-watch Rob Reiner’s, Mike Nichols’, Fincher’s and Bennet Miller’s translations.
It’s a good bet that Steve Jobs will premiere at TIFF this year (maybe closing?), but there’s also a chance it will screen before that at Telluride (which showed Boyle’s 127 Hours in 2010). Either way, it won’t be too long before we all get to see it.
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