Yes, Oscar-winner Aaron Sorkin based the movie on the best-selling “Steve Jobs” biography by Walter Isaacson. These are all real-life characters from Jobs’ life from the 1970s through the launch of the iMac in 1998. In the Jobs universe, MBAs and standard-issue CEOs were, at best, scared followers and, at worst, callow fools.
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What we are privy to are the melodramatic backstage preparations and arguments and maneuverings, all of which reveal aspects of Jobs’ work and family life that underscore the disparity between his public and private personas. Thanks to Sorkin, Boyle, and Fassbender for a Jobs well done. It puts him in the context of the symphonic conductor; the maestro; the impresario; the unveiler of beauty. The movie takes place in three discrete 40-minute chapters, each of which finds Jobs on the verge of presenting one of his signature products. To be sure, “Steve Jobs” has its own integrity as the story of the young innovator, but it’s a little like making a movie about Thomas Edison and stopping somewhere between the phonograph and the lightbulb. Perhaps in 2020, Sorkin will release Bill Gates: Assh-?
Jobs had an illegitimate daughter when he was 23, named Lisa Brennan. Jobs’ own life ended on October 5, 2011, when he died of cancer at 56. That relationship is one of the key points throughout the film and is also the most heartbreaking.
Today, as you will know if you are semi-obsessive about now-deceased company CEOs, is Steve Jobs Day; it was first declared such by Governor of California Jerry Brown in 2011. You wanna give up your iPhone now? Or you can treat it as if it just fell from the sky. And you’ll pay for the new upgrade, too. Think Charles Foster Kane, a person who wasn’t a nice man, but was a great man. On the surface, “Jobs” can feel like one of the products produced by its titular character: sleek, crisp, functional. It is a cheap but effective moment of dramatic irony, at the journo’s expense.
Thanks to Fassbender’s revelatory performance – a carefully calibrated mix of pride, self-loathing, frustration, arrogance and near-visceral self-righteousness – Jobs comes across as a captivating monster, a dictator in a black turtleneck who is impossible to ignore. It hasn’t really been a shift in what I want to do, it’s just been string of stories I want to do that happen to be non-fiction. Maybe Aaron Sorkin thinks we can’t handle the truth. Rather than the boyish, bow-tied nerd and, later, the Zenned-out, turtleneck-wearing philosopher king, the movie’s Jobs is arrogant, petty, insecure and perpetually enraged, just as he’s utterly confident that he’s on the cusp of changing the world. We are drawn to them in the theater but suspect we don’t need them in life. When the soundtrack pumps up to tell us that it’s about to end, it leaves the audience wanting more. If you’re one of those guys, this is very annoying. Even those who are not Apple consumers will not able to go far without its influence. Sorkin does not hesitate to kill off the competing identities.
SAN FRANCISCO | Apple co-founder Steve Jobs became renowned for conjuring a “reality distortion field” that made people believe whatever he wanted. He gives both people in an argument a tremendous amount of ammunition. There’s also his overworked chief engineer Andy Hertzfeld and Apple CEO John Sculley.
He is left scrambling for his place in history. That makes Steve Jobs “the most sophisticated take yet in a growing body of…”
And while one got a decent sense of Mark Zuckerberg from Sorkin’s script for The Social Network and of Billy Beane from his Moneyball, we don’t learn a whole about Jobs from this film that we didn’t know beforehand. Is this about the accumulation of kinder, gentler wisdom, or is this the pathetic last act of a flailing genius who has run up against his sell-by date?
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Sorkin and Boyle don’t limit themselves with such mundane restraints, they freely compress and embellish (does a spurned mother and her daughter seeking alms when about to go on welfare really show up 10 minutes before a product demo launch, three times?) and bite into something piquant and tart.
