National Post (National Edition)
Citizen Jobs
The new Steve Jobs movie does violence not merely to facts but credibility
Steve Jobs is a flawed film about an allegedly flawed man. Jobs may have been the high-tech guru who founded Apple Inc., created the Macintosh, the iPhone, the iPad, and iTunes, and made Apple the most valuable company in the world (most of which doesn’t make it into the movie). But apart from that he was a jerk.
This is a hatchet job for the zeitgeist, in line with the suggestion, often expressed with a crocodile tear, that the high-tech corporate visionaries who have sprung up in the past few decades — Jobs, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg — are, regrettably, “just like” the corporate moguls of old: the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords.
But of course they are, and that’s a good thing. Some may be, or may have been, harsh taskmasters, hypocritical or even outright weird, but they were, and are, all servants of consumers — the ultimate masters — and tremendous contributors to society. And if their employees didn’t want to do it the boss’s way, the highway was always available. They have no similarities whatsoever to “tyrants,” except in the thesaurus of sloppy business metaphors and film makers.
Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin, who also penned The Social Network, Steve Jobs comes across as a stage play rather than a — very loosely — adapted book (Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs). It unfolds in three acts. Each takes place immediately before a product launch, and has Jobs — played by Michael Fassbender — dealing simultaneously with the crises attached to achieving his stretchiest of “stretch targets,” and his personal life. Such a compression does violence not merely to facts but credibility.
The first act is the 1984 launch of the Macintosh, part of which was an arresting Nineteen Eighty-Four-themed TV ad — played during that year’s Superbowl — suggesting that Apple was launching a revolution. It was certainly part of a revolution. The key technical issue is that the Mac isn’t ready for prime time, but Jobs bullies his staff to make it perform exactly as he wants: albeit it just to say “Hello.”
As he is preparing to go onstage, his ex-girlfriend appears with his five-year-old daughter, Lisa, demanding alimony. Jobs had indeed sought to deny paternity in the most public and painful way. His daughter will turn up in each act, as will John Scully (Jeff Daniels), the man who temporarily supplanted Jobs at Apple. Apple co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak (Seth Rogen) is also ever present as the symbol of Jobs’ ingratitude.
Act Two involves Jobs next company, called, appropriately, NeXT, which is launching yet another semi-Potemkin product, a computer cube without the advertised innards. Mother and daughter again appear to establish Jobs’ heartlessness. His defenestration from Apple is portrayed in stormy, dramatically lit flashback with overtones, appropriately, of Citizen Kane (As one critic of the film who knew Jobs well has noted, when Orson Welles made a film loosely based on the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, he didn’t call it Citizen Hearst).
The final act has Jobs — now back in control at Apple — launching the Mac laptop. Since there are no flash-forwards, we have to be content with Apple’s head of marketing, Joanna Hoffman, played by Kate Winslet, telling Jobs that sales projections are off the charts. Hoffman appears throughout all three acts as the one character able to elicit Jobs reluctant Better Angel. She is semi-fictional and has, of course, always been secretly in love with him.
Daddy and daughter meet during Act Three on the roof of the launch building for him to establish that he still has Grinch tendencies, but to exculpate himself as being not “well made.” Nevertheless, he makes a promise to his daughter — who has, for a suddenly obvious reason, been carrying clunky cassette recorders since Act Two — that he will put a thousand songs in her pocket. Now there’s a promise he will keep! Sorkin’s psychoanalysis concludes that it’s all a daddy thing. Jobs was adopted twice, having been “sent back” the first time. He doesn’t acknowledge his real father, although he knows who he is (A Syrian immigrant. Now there’s the case for accepting more Syrian refugees!). Scully is a surrogate Dad, but their relationship gets Oedipal at the Apple board. And all this is meant somehow to explain why he’s both a crappy Dad (which he apparently wasn’t in real life, apart from that paternity thing), and a business tyrant. This is “Pop” psychology, in every sense, at its worst.
The essence of Jobs’ genius inevitably remains as much a mystery as that of Beethoven or Einstein. Men of uncompromising vision often tend to be pains. That’s because, in a hyper-competitive environment, geniuses can’t afford to move at the speed of the slowest thinker. Woz suggests in the third act that it doesn’t have to be “binary:” you don’t have to be a jerk to be a genius, but for Jobs — however jerky he really was — it likely was never a matter of choice. His vision had to come first.
Meanwhile perhaps Sorkin’s fundamental problem is that the Invisible Hand is not just difficult to grasp (particularly for the guy who wrote The West Wing and loves Barack Obama), it is, for obvious reasons, impossible to film.