Steve Jobs

Most people only know Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs through watching his now-iconic (and often spoofed) Apple product launch events, or through the gorgeous streamlined tech that sits in their pockets. Jobs is a figure widely associated with the slickest design and presentation, so it is not surprising that writer Aaron Sorkin’s zippy, elaborate and always entertaining (though far from perfect) screenplay approaches the man through the warm-ups to three of his key product launches over a two-decade period, making explicit that one of the key points of contention his family and colleagues had with him was how the manufactured public image of Steve Jobs, designed to complement the warm, friendly face of the new user-friendly computers he was fanatically pushing, stood in stark contrast to the callous, ruthlessly focused figure they had to co-exist with.

Adapting Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Jobs, Sorkin’s narrative is built around the launches of the original Macintosh in 1984, Jobs’s NEXT college-oriented cube shaped computer in 1988 (made outside of Apple after he had been fired by the company board), and the best-selling streamlined and translucent iMac in 1998. As with Sorkin's The Social Network and Moneyball, the focus here is on an abrasive figure who was at the epicentre of change, sitting right on the intersection of technology, communication and business, but whose ideas were resisted both because they were ahead of their time and because the figure pushing them was “a difficult one”.

Sorkin loves an iconoclast. This is largely his movie. Director Danny Boyle doesn’t do a bad job but beyond some visual flourishes such as using stylised intertitles to mark each time period, some askew camera angles (including seemingly taking the Macintosh’s point of view) and a general sense of constant movement familiar from his earlier films - well matched to Sorkin’s seeming refusal to let his characters talk while standing still - you’d be hard pressed if sent in cold to spot this was Boyle’s picture.

Compressing the Steve Jobs experience down to three seminal periods creates a sense of a nifty pace, but also contrivance, with much of the screen-time consisting of characters wandering in and out of Jobs’ orbit with dizzying regularity, each one with a grievance that just happens to illuminate one aspect of his personality. The pleasant-faced but frustrated Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), Apple’s other founder, shuffles and stutters - clearly he could never be the presentational face of Apple - but he is there to remind his friend of the backroom programmers whose less glamorous Apple 2 machine helped gift Apple with the financial clout to take chances on Jobs’s ahead-of-their-time flops.

Jobs’ head of marketing Joanna Hoffman is, in many ways, his conscience as well as his fixer, quietly in despair about her boss’s refusal to acknowledge the paternity of his daughter Lisa and his coldness to ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston). I have no idea how true to history these sequences of events are, but the narrative pattern starts to feel repetitive, and the restless camera, always trailing behind Jobs and whoever is struggling to get his attention, becomes a little tiring eventually. Maybe that is the point; to show how these people are stuck in a loop no matter how many products they burn through. If you know Sorkin’s writing at all, you can see the beats coming too; a lot of walking and talking, with one final zinger thrown over the shoulder of the lead character as they walk out of a door. It doesn’t take much to nudge Sorkin’s writing from feeling insightful and witty to gratingly smug.

Still, it can’t be denied that Sorkin can craft some ear-tickling, metaphor-laden dialogue, even if it is impossible to imagine real people actually speaking it with this level of consistency. It is certainly energising, in the first half of the film at least before it becomes exhausting, to spend so much screen time with people who exist in a constant state of intelligent near-panic. The script is laced with some genuinely funny beats too, many of which show the absurdity that went on backstage and which underlay parts of the Apple ethos of “think different”. Thus Jobs is constantly harangued by CEO John Scully (Jeff Daniels) over his shareholder’s concerns over the use of “skinheads” in the groundbreaking Apple commercial that riffed on Orwell’s 1984 (which was directed by The Martian director Ridley Scott), a fixation that drives Jobs crazy given how massive the ad was. Jobs’s daughter Lisa at one point gets argumentative with her father, who is still in denial about their connection, about the NEXT cube not actually being a cube: she’s measured it with her child’s ruler from her schoolbag. Her father is forced to explain that the lack of “cube-ness” is a deliberate design feature to exploit human perceptions of symmetry.

There are two interlinked major arcs in the film; Jobs’ struggle to accept that his daughter is biologically his, and his relentless focus on the need to make Apple’s computers closed-off ecosystems where cross-compatibility and raw power are no longer the real concerns, but accessibility and a welcoming appearance to the average joe are. The latter thread is the more interesting because it can’t be viewed outside of the fascinating reality where history has justified Jobs entirely. Though the film shows how his first few product launches are disasters and result in him being ejected from Apple, he clearly saw ahead that people would ultimately care more for ease of use, for comfort, than the ability to customise the internals and to learn code. This is the major point of contention between Jobs and Wozniak, shown in flashback as being an unresolved tension since the early days of their partnership when they were just ex-hippies in a garage knocking up motherboards and stealing ideas. Jobs’s maniacal focus on walled-in computer architecture of course is a bone of contention about Apple’s way of doing business today and the film takes a knowing jab at this, but this desire for singular control is given further context by the implication that it is more than a mere business choice.

In a maybe too on-the-nose move, the screenplay suggests this urge for unity and perfection is directly linked to Jobs’ own insecurity given his adopted childhood background, and the computers he designs are obviously presented as a metaphor for his displaced and confused feelings about his daughter. The Macs are the kind of children he can deal with. He even sits with Lisa in front of the original Macintosh at one point, looking at it more fondly than the real living human sitting on his lap, using her warm reactions to it as proof of it’s appeal rather than taking fatherly pride in pleasing her. This all adds up to give Jobs enough dimensions as a character, but what we arrive at is still a somewhat routine genius archetype portrait despite all the ornate scripting. A man more at home with machines and code than people, who refutes his paternity by a focus on “a 94 per cent probability” which leaves him possibly one of the six per cent who might not be the father. A man who determines the NEXT’s success by the millimetre difference between the front dimensions and the back. This feels like familiar ground; it is roughly the same ironic contradiction that lay at the heart of The Social Network’s misanthropic lead character.

In terms of casting, Fassbender looks nothing like Jobs, and apparently remarked on this when the role was offered, saying: “even Christian Bale looks more like Steve Jobs than me”. However, he manages to keep his character on the right side of human even when Sorkin’s dialogue drifts towards being too unsubtle or sumptuous. He can do stiff, he can do arrogant, he can do intimidating, though he gets less of a chance to show us the charisma which supposedly held so many in sway. Kate Winslet is fine as Hoffman too, but is kind of stuck in the “female voice of conscience” mould and her accent is distracting; it weirdly gets more Polish as the years pass. The real star here is of course Sorkin, a man whose dialogue and characters are much like the iPhones, iMac’s and iPad’s his film’s subject put into our hands; ridiculously elegant, crafted to within an inch of their life, yet not quite able to hide their flaws with their design.