Instead of the exhortation to turn off mobile phones before cinema screenings of STEVE JOBS, it might be more appropriate to invite the audience to turn them all on and hold up their little lit screens, in tribute to the creator of the iPhone and of much else we now take for granted prefaced with a lower-case ‘i’. The man himself would have thought it was no less than his due. In fact he would probably have insisted on it, just as Steve Jobs demands that the launch of his Macintosh computer in 1984 begin with the excited and expectant audience being greeted with a ‘Hello’ from the beige box on the stage.
From his dogged determination that this coup-de-theatre should work despite its technical near-impossibility, we gain immediate insight into the single-mindedness of Jobs (Michael Fassbender), an attitude described elsewhere as the ‘Reality Distortion Field’. Anybody thinking differently or putting an alternative point of view will be humiliated and/or sworn at, usually in front of a crowd of supposedly lesser brains, and that includes Steve Wozniak (Jobs’s mild-mannered collaborator and the real genius behind the string of inventions, played by Seth Rogan), John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) his sympathetic boss head-hunted from Pepsi-Cola (‘Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?’) and Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) his long-suffering but clear-sighted PA (‘Things don’t become so because you say so’).
In fact everybody surrounding Steve Jobs is long-suffering, most damagingly his ex-girlfriend Chrisann and Lisa the daughter whose parentage he disputes, cold-bloodedly arguing that statistically 28% of the male American population could be her biological father. Nevertheless he later claims that an early personal Apple computer, an expensive misfire called The Lisa (Local Integrated System Architecture) was named after her…though he still digs his heels in about paying maintenance and education fees. Like Wozniak and Sculley, Chrisann and Lisa appear at each of three product launches – the Macintosh, the NeXT black cube-shaped computer in 1988 and the translucent turquoise iMac in 1998 – which forms the structure of STEVE JOBS.
Yet for all his (Fassbender’s) skill, Steve Jobs defeats him …
Directed with characteristic brio by Danny Boyle it is the dramatic build-up rather than the launches themselves that we see, falling into a pattern of harangues from aggrieved colleagues and loved ones, and punctuated by swathes of technical exposition dealt with in breathless walk-and-talk scenes familiar from screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s THE WEST WING and THE SOCIAL NETWORK. Each launch is another step on the road to Jobs’s seeming megalomania, first dismissing Wozniak’s plea for credit by pointing out that he only plays an instrument in the orchestra while he, Jobs, plays the orchestra itself, and culminating (by now wearing his full black-t-shirt, jeans and white sneakers uniform) in a full-on demolition of his former partner, to which Wozniak replies in one of many of the movie’s studiedly quotable lines: ‘You can be decent and gifted at the same time’.
And as if to prove the point Steve Jobs delays the launch of the iMac with a scene of reconciliation with Lisa conducted the only way he knows how, promising ‘I’ll put a thousand songs in your pocket’, i.e. by inventing the iPod and replacing her crappy old Walkman, after which Lisa consents to watch the launch. It also incidentally underlines Ian Hislop’s theory that all American movies are finally about ‘I love you, Dad’.
Except that for this one it comes way too late. Michael Fassbender showed in FRANK that even while wearing a cartoon head for 95% of the time he can create a sympathetic character. Yet for all his skill, Steve Jobs defeats him. The thorough dislikability of the man portrayed here is in no way helped by the warmth of the expert players surrounding him, in particular Jeff Daniels (Sculley), Seth Rogen (Wozniak) and Kate Winslet (Joanna Hoffman) who Jobs throws away as quickly as she can give her reply – ‘Because we’re not in love’ – when asked ‘How come we never slept together?’ She could have added ‘And because the audience doesn’t care’.
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