The Steve Jobs who emerges in Steve Jobs is not a likable guy. Virtually no one in the film, except his faithful factotum Joanna Hoffman, likes him—and even she has her doubts. “I’m not well made,” he confesses in the end. Even then, he refers to himself as if he were one of his products, a computer with an imperfect operating system.
Drawn from Walter Isaacson’s biography, Steve Jobs is a brilliant film, written with kaleidoscopic élan by Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network). Does it accurately represent its subject? This is stirring controversy, with everyone who ever met him weighing in with his own version. Sorkin’s Jobs is deliberately larger than life, his outsized scale allowing a better measure of the man. As calculated as a computer, but a machine that might be capable of crying, Sorkin’s Jobs is a Shakespearean character cursed at birth as an unwanted child and nearly brought down by his own hubris. But as everyone knows, Jobs’ career had a Hollywood happy ending. Director Danny Boyle triumphantly stages it as the grand finale—the 1998 unveiling of the iMac, the friendly looking desk model that finally convinced the world that computers are benign, user-friendly companions.
Michael Fassbender gives a powerful performance in the title role, glowering with the sharp glint of the self-made genius and the shark-like leer of a predator, staring with the blank incomprehension of a man in selective denial of reality and—finally—making awkward steps toward embracing his humanity. He is accompanied along the journey from the Macintosh launch (1984) through the introduction of the failed NeXT Black Cube (1988) and his 1998 return to power at Apple by Hoffman (Kate Winslet), his perpetually flustered assistant. The other key figures in his adult life, the people who actually enabled Jobs’ rise despite his claims of being all knowing and self created, come and go and are often subjected to his withering contempt or bland indifference. Coding mastermind Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) is a gentle fuzzy bear frustrated at Jobs’ refusal to acknowledge the team that built Apple; programmer Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) is browbeaten but resilient; Apple’s original CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) is the disappointed father figure, forced to be the bad guy after Jobs’ self-induced 1985 firing from the company he had co-founded.
Also, dogging his life, is the woman he jilted (Katherine Waterston) and their daughter Lisa, whom he resolutely refuses to acknowledge as his child, but is badgered to support by the little-used conscience icon on his emotional tool bar.
Sorkin identifies Jobs’ self-perception as an artist, and a true artist (contrary to what some say nowadays) doesn’t crowdsource his work. As an example, Jobs cites Bob Dylan, whose image and music is a subtle thread woven through the film. And yet, perhaps like all artists, his genius rises from the shoulders of others. Sorkin’s Jobs advocates closed systems while proclaiming a future where computers will “not be in the right hands but in everyone’s hands.” The paradox of the tyrannical democrat is never resolved and, wisely, Sorkin doesn’t try to untie all the knots. His Jobs is a man who could see the forest but often missed the trees.
Steve Jobs
3 and a half stars
Michael Fassbender
Kate Winslet
Directed by Danny Boyle
R
