Steve Jobs (2015)

Steve Jobs arrives as a three-act backstage drama, all corridors and countdowns, in which Aaron Sorkin's people walk briskly and speak in complete paragraphs. Danny Boyle shoots it on three film stocks to mark the passage from 1984 to 1998, a formal gesture that announces seriousness. The subject is a man of enormous wealth and limited warmth, and the film treats his cruelty mostly as a symptom of having been given up at birth. That is a psychological reading, not a political one.

On the ledger of modern social consciousness, the film registers as a faint pulse. Kate Winslet's Joanna Hoffman is the only person permitted to knock sense into the genius, and she does so with a moral authority the script grants her without argument. That gives the picture a sturdy female center. The critique of corporate ruthlessness never travels far enough to indict the system. The visionary capitalist is mourned, not dismantled. The cast is white, the Silicon Valley of the era is rendered as such, and no commentary is attached. Race, sexuality, climate, body, mind: none of it is the film's business.

The rest is Sorkin sermonizing at volume about fathers and daughters and the price of genius. The lecturing has no cause attached to it, which makes for an odd vintage. Fassbender captures the essence, as he put it, and the essence turns out to be a man shouting in a hallway. The film is well made and well acted, and it leaves the culture wars to other people. It closes with a father handing his daughter a printout he kept for years, and we are meant to weep. Some of us took notes instead.