But the elements, qualities, achievements, or actions that make this person’s life exemplary and dramatic may not be immediately detectable from any particular moment that this person actually lived.
Every bio-pic affirms, first, that it’s worth your while to know about this person’s life and, second, that there’s something about this person’s life that makes it extraordinary and exemplary, that transforms this person into a character equal to those of fiction. The prime cause of every bio-pic isn’t informational it’s moral and reflexive.
( Laura Bradley and Rick Tetzeli do the heavy lifting at Slate and Fast Company, respectively.) It’s the fact that the fictionalized elements of the movie don’t produce increased insight into Jobs, and don’t lead to a grasp of Jobs’s spirit in exchange for the reportorial letter of his life story. The problem with “Steve Jobs” isn’t its departures from facts about Jobs’s life that can be rapidly gleaned from a glance at Walter Isaacson’s biography of him. It’s as easy to lie with facts as it is with fictions-a tendentious selection of verifiable events can turn an ostensible report into a grotesque distortion. In any case, the distinction between fiction and nonfiction isn’t the distinction between falsehood and truth. Michael Fassbender as the title character in “Steve Jobs.” PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCOIS DUHAMEL / UNIVERSAL PICTURES / EVERETT