“I’m not the person for it”.
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Although I wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about Facebook’s origins, I nonetheless argued that the insights of “The Social Network” into the culture of Silicon Valley trumped any niggling facts Sorkin might have ignored or distorted.
“It’s not binary”, says Sorkin’s version of Steve Wozniack confronting Steve Jobs. Unlike Zuckerberg, Jobs is somebody I followed closely for much of my career, even spending a week in the mid-1980s embedded at NeXT, the company Jobs founded after being tossed out of Apple in 1985. That’s the question we’re confronted with in the new “Steve Jobs” biopic, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Danny Boyle.
And though we do see Jobs struggling to be a decent human being with his first daughter, we never see his family – wife Laurene Powell Jobs and his three children with her. Powell Jobs reportedly tried to get the movie shut down, with the Hollywood Reporter recently reporting that she had called actors Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio, urging them not to take the starring role. According to the real Woz, they are all fiction. Wozniak said that Michael Fassbender, whose performance has made him an Oscar favourite, showed the “brilliance” he loved about Jobs, as well as the flaws.
Wozniak touched on other subjects in the interview, including his admiration for Elon Musk, innovation at Apple, and a conversation with Jobs before his death about the possibility of Wozniak’s return to Apple. There had never been such a successful company turnaround, such a string of successful products, such an arc of personal transformation from unruly young man to Grand Master of Management.
There are moments in the film, like the big “reconciliation” scene with his out-of-wedlock daughter, Lisa, that are nearly offensively in opposition to the truth. The most moving scenes come at the end and enable the film to finish strong, when Jobs refuses to unveil the iMac until he gets to read one of Lisa’s college newspaper articles.
For instance, one character mentions Jobs’ ability to create a “reality distortion field”. Within minutes – literally – flowers and testimonials began to pile up at the door of his neighborhood Apple store in Palo Alto and, soon, around the world: At the time, I felt that the breadth and depth of the sentiment was justified.
Like the tightly controlled aesthetics of Jobs, himself, the movie is a closed system.
“People loved working for Steve”, Mr Sculley said. “And the properties of people and the properties of “characters” are two completely different things”.
In “Steve Jobs”, the screenwriter’s signature is as obvious as in a Preston Sturges or Woody Allen film. While Steve Jobs may not deliver quite the emotional payload that Social Network did, the film lands its strongest punches during its scenes of the reluctant father relationship between Jobs and Lisa.
“If you deviate too much from the actual historical record”, he said, “the illusion is going to collapse”.
Tim Cook, Apple’s current chief executive, has decried the recent spate of Jobs movies as “opportunistic”. Just breezing through the room, his Jobs is an impressive man. What he lacks is the thing that the film probably didn’t need, but that the real Steve Jobs did need and had.
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Sorkin’s version of Jobs is a fusion of the intellect-speak Sorkin has perfected on shows like The West Wing and The Newsroom.
