We sure are hungry for secular saints these days. That’s the only way I can account for the guileless early raves for Steve Jobs, starring Michael Fassbender as Apple’s messiah and directed by Danny (Slumdog Millionaire) Boyle from Aaron Sorkin’s predictably show-offy script. Call me a heretic, but a movie that tells us to admire a marketing genius as ego-driven and hard-nosed as Jobs for his spiritual example will never be my cup of tea. Around midway through, I started having unexpected visions of a Richard Nixon biopic that keeps on obstinately circling back to what a wonderful piano player he was.
All the same, the movie’s weirdly quasi-religious tone probably isn’t a misreading of the audience’s priorities. John Lennon’s been sleeping with the fishes for an awfully long time, and Sorkin is evidently betting that the current generation could use a successor to Lennon’s world-shaking mythos: “Give iPods a Chance,” more or less. Although Jobs’s death from cancer at age 56 isn’t dramatized on-screen, the filmmakers count on our knowledge of it to transfigure him into a prophet who didn’t quite live to see the Promised Land—meaning Siri, I guess, or maybe just Apple’s current profit margin. Brother, does capitalism look different when its goals are depicted as avant-garde.
Unsurprisingly, Fassbender is quite good. He looks great in Jobs’s trademark black turtleneck and minuscule Smart Guy specs, too. But he’s held back by the way the conception turns Jobs’s tantrums and nasty streak, which are too well known for the movie to omit outright, into starry-eyed proof of his exalted sense of mission. Though Fassbender sometimes seems to be dropping hints that he’d have been happier trying out a less glowing interpretation, he’s doing his best to play someone who’s so special that to criticize his vanity only advertises how mediocre you are.
Basically, the movie only makes sense if you’re convinced beforehand that this is someone the planet should revere. Even Spielberg’s Lincoln worked harder to make a plausible and specific case for Abe’s greatness, as opposed to treating worship as a given. Despite Sorkin’s characteristic pride in mastering a specialized milieu’s lingo—the computer-nerd jabber flies thick and fast—Steve Jobs isn’t really about a technological revolution, let alone a warts-and-all portrait of its savviest entrepreneur. It’s about a wonderful visionary whose presence among us enhanced our humdrum lives, and never mind exactly how.
As you may have heard, the structure is on the theatrical side. Instead of a conventional storyline, we’re given a triptych of protracted sequences portraying an already iconic Jobs and the pressures on him at three high-stakes product launches: the gala unveiling of the Macintosh in 1984, the 1988 debut of the NeXT cube after he and Apple had acrimoniously parted ways, and the iMac’s introduction a decade later once he’d returned to the fold. While this does leave out a lot of the usual biopic clutter, the results aren’t what you’d call cinematic. A lot of the time, it’s like watching a stage musical with the songs bizarrely left out.
To provide an illusion of momentum, not to say momentousness, each segment is a countdown to the moment when our hero triumphantly takes the stage after badgering everyone to make the presentation perfect, sort of like Yves Saint Laurent with more gigantic ambitions. Or maybe—cough, cough—like Sorkin himself, since he’s hardly the dude to poke holes in anyone else’s overweening pretensions or vainglorious self-image. The suspicion that he’s putting words in Jobs’s mouth to justify his own flamboyant career isn’t especially attractive, but it does help explain some of the movie’s nuttier convolutions in rationalizing vanity and bad behavior as creativity’s handmaidens.
Though Boyle tries hard, it may be to his credit that he isn’t the right director for this sort of thing. He likes inventive visual variety, frisky sideshows, and casually interesting—that is, not ostentatiously thematic—acting. No wonder his fairly desperate tries at livening up the wordy script just call attention to how repetitive and static the material is. In any case, just why the backstage turmoil at a series of PR stunts deserves this magnified treatment is never all that clear, since the consequences of failure—except to Jobs’s reputation, I suppose—seem awfully trivial. But the gimmick is a great excuse for the same clutch of key figures in his life to turn up to harass him at every one of them, making Groundhog Day seem just full of surprises by comparison.
The neediest visitor is Lisa Brennan, the child—played at different ages, from 5 to 19, by Makenzie Moss, Ripley Sobo, and Perla Haney-Jardine—whose paternity Jobs long refused to acknowledge despite grudgingly helping to support her mother, his pre-fame girlfriend Crisann (Katherine Waterston). If you think his intransigence makes him kind of a shitheel, guess again. The point isn’t Lisa’s pain, but her emotionally blocked Dad’s inner anguish. In Sorkin’s world, women only exist to frame men’s pain, like Polynesian palm fronds quietly shading the screaming testicle we call the moon.
Emotionally, the movie’s Jobs is just waiting for Apollo 11 to land. Traumatized by his orphan origins, he’s frightened of caring about people because he can’t accept how much they care about him. Anyone who can’t foresee the schmaltzy resolution must be unfamiliar with the time-honored role of the Estranged Daughter in movies lionizing men who turn out to have been wistfully great-hearted fellows all along underneath their psychological armor. If you’ve always wished for Citizen Kane to end with the hero reunited with his sled, the finale will make you very happy.
Steve Jobs has an ace supporting cast, including Kate Winslet as his long-suffering office majordomo Joanna Hoffman, Seth Rogen as disgruntled Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak—the genuine computer whiz whose innovations his partner’s design flair and branding savvy turned into a commercial juggernaut—and Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, the Pepsi CEO Jobs lured to run Apple before he ended up engineering Jobs’s exit. Yet if Winslet, Rogen, and Daniels have rarely been duller—as is Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays another member of the original Apple team—go figure. Even actors this gifted at holding our interest can only think up so many ways to say “We represent the Lullaby League” or “We represent the Lollipop Guild.”
In other words, they aren’t playing people we’re supposed to take any interest in for their own sake. Not only is their basic function apostolic, but the frustrations they vent at Jobs’s obsessiveness just amplify the great man’s uniqueness by making his minions’ concerns seem petty. Even when they think they’re expressing resentment—e.g., Rogen’s Wozniak demanding in exasperation, “What makes you you?”—they’re really expressing awe. No wonder Stuhlbarg—one of the smartest actors alive—seems to have decided to while away his time by channeling The Big Bang Theory’s Johnny Galecki.
But he’s not the only one being misused. In a way that’s becoming all too familiar, this is a movie with more agendas than purpose: Is this meant to be Oscar bait? Is it radical Oscar bait? Or just crowd-pleasing schlock? What’s all too obvious is that nobody asked what the point of all this inordinate confusion was. So help me, I think that’s kind of unfair to Steve Jobs.