From Takimag: Steve Jobs, the superbly theatrical film about the Apple cofounder’s turbulent mid-career arc, opened in Los Angeles and New York over the weekend to the best per-theater grosses since American Sniper.
It looks as if it will be another upmarket hit for screenwriter Aaron Sorkin in the tradition of his 2010 Mark Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network and his 2011 Billy Beane biopic Moneyball. Both were book adaptations that sounded close to impossible to turn into comprehensible movies.
We are supposed to be living in an age of great television and weak films. But when given his own television shows with ample hours of airtime to fill with his earnest opinions, such as Sports Night, the Clinton White House fantasy The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and The Newsroom, Sorkin tends to be insufferable.
On the other hand, when Sorkin is brought into a movie production as a hired gun and told to somehow cram a technical topic that he doesn’t necessarily care all that much about, such as Moneyball’s revolution in baseball statistics, into a two-hour screenplay, he’s a master of middlebrow.
The quality of Sorkin’s screenplay for Steve Jobs suggests that he has perfected a new genre of movie: the informative business-executive biopic. You could call it the Frequent Flyer Movie.
To me, the term “middlebrow”—in the sense of a story being educational as well as entertaining—is high praise. When browsing in the airport bookstore, the kind of guy who racks up 100,000 miles per year on the corporate credit card wants something that will be diverting but might also sneak in some new way of thinking that could help him on the job.
