Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin recently remarked upon the cult of Steve Jobs as unlike anything he had seen since the murder of John Lennon. Certainly, the late Apple co-founder still manages to elicit the kind of reaction normally reserved for the most innovative of rock superstars. The man’s legacy is without question, just look around at the many hundreds of people you will see on any given day tapping away at Apple products and the hordes of converted who will stubbornly buy only that tech bearing the little fruit logo. Before watching Danny Boyle’s biopic I had wondered if that lasting legacy would prove to be problematic and colour the film. Would it be possible to do justice to a character who was plainly as difficult as he was brilliant? For me, there was always a worry that any look back at his life would amount to little more than grandstanding which added to the mythologizing cult of Jobs.
Happily, Sorkin and Boyle’s look at the man feels pretty even-handed. Shown as a man who is almost equally as petulant, difficult and downright unpleasant as he is a genius, Steve Jobs doesn’t shy away from showing the grimmer side of the man who left many casualties in his wake. Michael Fassbender as Jobs is intensely difficult as a pig-headed, driven and utterly relentless pursuer of perfection. Fassbender’s performance is both thrillingly inspiring and gut-wrenchingly difficult to bear. He is shown consistently denying paternity of his first daughter and relentlessly haranguing his Apple colleagues Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) and Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg). Kate Winslet as his long-suffering assistant deserves equal praise for a performance that is every bit as absorbing, with an enthralling sense of perpetual harassment.
Sorkin’s script is typical Sorkin. His trick here is split the narrative into three real-time scenes which play out immediately before Jobs takes to the stage for a product launch. Firstly: in 1984 for the Apple Macintosh, secondly in 1988 for the launch of the NeXT Computer and, lastly, in 1998 for the iMAC. The artificial narrative structure is as thrilling as it is contrived. Ticking down the clock in the seconds before show time, characters repeatedly seek out Jobs to seek advice, complain and continue long-running arguments. The effect is one of having an artificial sense of jeopardy, with Jobs having to tie up loose ends before he can crack on with his demonstration. It works, there’s no doubting that, but one can never shake the sense of ludicrousness that all these encounters would occur at such plainly inconvenient times.
Despite the general sense of even-handedness, the ending provides nothing if not a little food for doubt. The film concludes on a reconciliation of sorts and a flashback to Jobs explaining to Apple CEO John Scully (Jeff Daniels) his ultimate philosophy for founding the company: to put a computer into the hands of every person on earth and, ultimately, make the world a better place. This is followed on screen by a standing ovation in what seems like a tacit agreement on the part of the film that Apple’s perceived sense of righteousness is indeed accurate. A difficult note on which to end for someone who rather thinks that Apple’s purpose lies, not in altruism, but in shoving overpriced plastic trinkets down the public’s throats.
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