THE TRIAL OF JOBS
Alex Gibney’s documentary about Apple guru stops short of character assassination
It’s high technological irony that I write this review on a Macintosh computer, an iPhone at my left hand and an iPad at my right. You might even be reading it on an Apple product. Filmmaker Alex Gibney confesses to having a complicated relationship with the machines, and with the man behind them.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died of cancer four years ago this autumn, was neither devil nor saint. In Gibney’s assessment, however, there is ultimately more to dislike about him. He committed venial sins, like flagrant use of handicapped parking spots. He indulged in corporate mortal sins, such as taking unethical, almost certainly illegal backdated stock options. There are even sins of omission, like not giving enough back to the community (unlike Bill Gates).
Or as Daniel Kottke, former friend of Jobs and Employee No. 12 at Apple, puts it: “How much of an a — hole do you have to be to be successful?”
Apple apologists will point out that Jobs also shaped some of the technology that binds our world together. This in spite of the fact he didn’t even see a computer until a class trip to a NASA research centre when he was 12, and he wouldn’t see another until a few years later.
Yet by 21 he started selling Apples, which required not only technological and business savvy but evangelical skills. No one back then even knew they needed the quaintly named “personal computer.” An early interview has Jobs calling it “a 21st-century bicycle” to amplify our abilities, but in the mental rather than physical realm.
The documentary starts with a tone of awe, in part for Jobs but even more so for the era that gave birth to his ideas. The iPod had to wait until someone else invented a small, sturdy hard drive. Apple’s genius was to pounce on the technology and make it user-friendly, even sensual — a music box that played when you stroked its little white wheel.
And yet, even as his machines endeared him to a grateful world — more than one fan is seen sporting an Apple tattoo — Jobs was sliding into moral debt. He stole from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak after they were paid a bonus for creating the arcade game Breakout for Atari (the original Breakout hit!). He disavowed paternity of his daughter Lisa until DNA tests showed otherwise, and then paid a pittance in child support.
Even late in his life, he waged a bullying campaign against a technology journalist who purchased a lost-and-found iPhone 4 prototype, posted news about its features and then returned it to Jobs. David, seen giving the finger to IBM in a 1970s photo, had become Goliath.
Gibney, an Oscar nominee for 2006’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and winner for Taxi to the Dark Side in 2008, made his film without the co-operation of either Apple or Jobs’ family. He succeeds mightily in illustrating the contradictions and paradoxes within the man — surely someone who loved Bob Dylan and Buddhism couldn’t be all bad.
But the film sometimes goes too far — and at 128 minutes it could easily be a bit shorter — in conflating Jobs with the wrongdoings of the company and even the industry at large. Dodging taxes is hardly something Apple invented — it’s just that, as with the mouse and the graphical user interface, Apple made better use of it than most.
So too, environmental malfeasance and poor employee practices at Chinese factories. But Gibney’s evidence for Jobs’ uncaring attitude, on this front at least, is circumstantial.
The film stops short of character assassination, though others have levelled that charge. What emerges is a complex individual, already the subject of numerous books and two biopics — the lacklustre Jobs with Ashton Kutcher from 2013, and this fall’s Steve Jobs, with a pedigree that includes director Danny Boyle, writer Aaron Sorkin (working from Walter Isaacson’s biography), and star Michael Fassbender.
Until that one opens, Gibney’s is just the latest presentation — one facet of a man who clearly had many.