Steve Jobs

Synopsis: The story of  Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) and the iMac.

Technology doesn’t do it for me. I don’t own an iPhone, an iPad, or an iMac. My PC runs Windows XP and shows no signs of being inadequate to my needs. So ends my interest in such things. That didn’t stop me being thoroughly engaged by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s and director Danny Boyle’s film, for it is a gripping portrait of a visionary social architect, and ample demonstration that whilst exceptional people may be exceptionally good at some things, they are also exceptionally bad at others. Jobs’s gifts were his far-sighted intelligence and unshakeable faith in himself. His shortcomings were that same intelligence and a hyper-rationalist's willingness to use and discard people according to his personal dictates.

Jobs was not a traditional computer geek - he didn’t write code or build information systems.  He didn’t need to because he knew propellor-heads who lived to do nothing else and were very good at it, notably Andy Herzfeld (Michael Stuhlberg) and Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) with whom he founded Apple Computers. What he brought to the table was a grand vision of how these skills could be used to change the way we live. In this respect he was (he died in 2011 at the age of 55) a kind of real-life version of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.  Although Rand conceived of her hero as an exemplar of untrammelled individuality who transcended collective acquiesence by dint of his creative will, there are good grounds for seeing him as an arrogant, controlling, emotionally dysfunctional narcissist. Which is pretty much how Jobs is portrayed here.

The film is structured into three parts. It opens in 1984 with the launch of the Macintosh which Jobs is certain will change the face of computing,  It doesn’t . Quite the reverse.  It fails dismally and Jobs is squeezed out of Apple.  Part Two  looks at his attempt to go it alone with 1988’s NeXT Cube, another failure which however eventually  gets him reinstated at Apple (Part Three) and results in 1998’s iMac and Job’s effective apotheosis as the Messiah of the I.T. world. Tying all this together is the story of Jobs’s maturing over the fourteen years the film covers, in particular through his relationship with his illegitimate daughter.

Sorkin and Boyle carry all this off brilliantly. The script, performances and pacing are taut and intense and the two hour running time flies by. Michael Fassbender, who is nominated for this year's Best Actor Oscar, is compelling in the lead but a virtually-unrecognizable Kate Winslet (who is nominated for Best Supporting Actress and should be a shoo-in) is equally as good as his long-suffering P.A., Joanna Hoffman. Seth Rogen gives a surprisingly creditable turn as Steve Wozniak and Jeff Daniels, in his increasingly familiar managerial persona, is a calming presence as Apple CEO, John Scully.

As we saw with his 2008 Academy Award winner Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle isn’t afraid to play the feel-good card and his film buys into the orgy of adulation that was the 1998 iMac launch.  It is a slightly disconcerting populist finale to what is otherwise an admirably intelligent insight into one of the key shapers of the internet age.

 

 

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