'Steve Jobs': Doesn't Get to the Core of the Apple
Whether meant to be a metaphor, simile, allegory or any of those other words describing an indirect representation of something or another, director Danny Boyle's eponymously titled "Steve Jobs" uses not a plot, but rather, an operating system to tell its tale. This latest attempt to nail down just who this enigmatic genius behind the PC revolution was is told via the events surrounding three major product launches. Each is a grand, staged event attended by adoring devotees and the press, where cataclysmic push comes to shove each time.
While I'd bet a gaggle of gigabytes that the grandiloquent speeches and pontifications serving as backstage dialogue at each of the unveilings take more than poetic license to make the biographical sketch's pungent points, director Boyle does find a way to make retail exciting. Each time, something threatens to go amiss, as in the first presentation when it looks like Macintosh might not say "hello" to the adoring throngs. Moreover, the clock is always ticking, and it seems as if the show can't possibly begin on time, a chief obsession of Jobs.
Heightening the drama, in the wings playing the role of a 21st-century Greek chorus, the living ghosts of our entrepreneur's past are inevitably in attendance, chanting their displeasure with the Great Man, smartly played by Michael Fassbender. Sharp tongues thrust and parry, laying blame and regret. They may be a tad right, they could be a whole lot envious. But through their diatribes and soliloquies, the film awkwardly packs megabytes of exposition.
All well and good. But here's the rub. Alas, too often witness to the mental turmoil and frequently at its epicenter is Lisa, Jobs' inadequately acknowledged daughter, the proverbial innocent born out of wedlock. The director, plying a screenplay Aaron Sorkin adapted from the book by Walter Isaacson, dabs two parts of Jobs' tempestuous career with one part sad and unfortunate implication of his failed fatherhood.
A postfilm scurry to Wikipedia, whether on your PC or Mac, will divulge that this delve into Daddy Dearest is but a scratch of the surface. This is, after all, Hollywood, and though the film biographies emanating from there have legitimized considerably over the years, there is still convention and formula. A tug at the heartstrings courtesy of the winsome girl portrayed at ages 5, 9 and 19 by three different actresses adds a touch of humanity to the film's hard drive.
Otherwise, prepare for scads of computer speak mixed with plenty of business theory, always measured against what's speculated to be right, moral and incumbent upon the inventor ... a recurring theme especially apt in the case of Jobs and his Silicon Valley counterparts. Aware of the countless Nikola Teslas whose great discoveries were never fully recompensed or properly appreciated, their lessons are not lost on today's creative minds. Accordingly, the tug of war between personal profit and obligation to the commonweal is given a decent mulling.
But we pine for more information, data that just might unlock the paradox. How did he do it ... set the information highway on its ear and reinvent it? Among Jobs' most vociferous love-haters, Steve Wozniak, the technical brain behind Apple who sadly sees himself as the Ringo of the inventive bonanza, addresses the perplexity best. Portrayed by Seth Rogen, he angrily rants, "You can't write code, can't put a hammer to a nail; you're not an engineer. What do you do?"
In other words, what is the nature of genius, that indefinable combination of properties and vision that allows those rare folk among us to foray into the future? But no answers are forthcoming. Instead, we get a look into the stereotypical byproduct generally ascribed to those so gifted, like profound irascibility and egotism. Answering Wozniak's query, Jobs retorts: "I play the orchestra. You're a good musician. You sit right there, the best in your row." The thought is, if you want fire and the wheel, you just have to put up with Oog's arrogance.
Still, despite the movie's failure to add nuance to the standard, biopic ponderings, our native intelligence suspects that, though emoted in rather rarified air, our subject's motivations pretty much echo the longings of us common folk. He'd like to be loved, cared for, and, yep, adulated. Admit it.
This soft underbelly is evoked through interactions with both Lisa and his longtime gal Friday/marketing guru, Joanna Hoffman, splendidly realized by Kate Winslet. Yet while these momentous catharses supply counterbalance to the sometimes obscure techno-babble, if they happened to, say, your dentist, it'd hardly be apt material for a movie treatment. Oh, you'll learn a little something. But in the final analysis, such glamorized mundanity coupled with the director's problematic style of delivery makes for a "Steve Jobs" that simply doesn't compute.
"Steve Jobs," rated R, is a Universal Pictures release directed by Danny Boyle and stars Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet and Seth Rogen. Running time: 122 minutes
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