'Steve Jobs' Nearly Perfect

“Artists lead and hacks ask for a show of hands,” says Steve Jobs (Michael Fassbender) to Apple CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) in Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin’s biopic of the Apple co-founder. The film follows Jobs’ rise, fall, and return, delving into his unrelenting bravado, his explosive relationships, and ultimately his art: leading even when that means walking alone. The snappy dialogue of Aaron Sorkin’s masterful screenplay, buttressed by convincing performances by the film’s lead actors and Boyle’s innovative direction, captures the complex essence of a man who was at once loathed and worshipped and ultimately changed the way in which we interact with our world.

Sorkin’s masterful screenplay digs into Jobs’ character with striking depth despite a relative lack of settings and scenes—the entirety of the mimetic action of the film occurs in the moments leading up to three product launches throughout Jobs’s career. While overloading these scenes with drama might have caused the script to fall flat, Sorkin is aware of the potential heavy-handedness of the narrative’s organization. During the third act, Jobs asks an auditorium full of employees if, “five minutes before each product launch, everyone goes and gets drunk and tells [him] how they really feel.” It is this lucidity that allows Sorkin’s script to overcome any necessary pitfalls of storytelling and keep the audience engaged, disbelief safely suspended.

The script also invites the audience into a sort of meta-joke by layering Sorkin’s screenplay with dramatic irony, playing on the gap between perceptions of computers in the early days of Apple and the knowledge of computers that has become so commonplace today. The film opens with a video clip of Arthur C. Clarke discussing in 1974 what he believed the computer would accomplish by 2001. “They will make it possible to live really anywhere we like. Any businessman, any executive, could live almost anywhere on Earth and still do his business through a device like this,” Clarke says. The peek back into the history of these machines that have become so commonplace provides a laugh, certainly, but it also begs the viewer to reflect on the seemingly endless reach of computers and to think about how they interact with them.

With such a large shadow cast by Sorkin’s screenplay, it is remarkable that director Danny Boyle is not entirely lost in the dark. While Boyle’s direction does tend to err toward safe shots that minimize the role of the camera and maximize the role of the dialogue, his directorial prowess shines through at select moments that are integral to the fabric the film. One particular sequence, which acts as a segue between two product launch acts, is a tracking shot that follows Jobs’s daughter Lisa (Perla Haney-Jardine) down a corridor, the camera floating along with boozy disregard, the lens drifting and poorly focused. Headlines are projected onto the frame, and the early failure of the Mac is made clear. The tactful and inspired direction of this sequence allows a four-year gap in the screenplay to pass without missing a beat.

And still, it is the stage-like simplicity of most scenes in the film that is most memorable. The actors who bring Sorkin’s words to life do so with remarkable vigor. Most remarkable of these performances is that of Kate Winslet, who dons an Eastern European accent in her portrayal of marketing executive Joanna Hoffman. She perfectly captures the complex nature of her character’s strange relationship with Jobs—she is once referred to as his “work-wife”—and is a likely candidate for nominations when awards season comes round.

Fassbender, for his part, plays a convincing Jobs. It is difficult to like his character, and that is the point. “The musicians play their instruments, and I play the orchestra,” he says in response to a comment that he lacks technical abilities. The Steve Jobs of Sorkin, Boyle, and Fassbender is an artist, perhaps even an auteur, but he is also a narcissist who alienates those around him. He pushes people away to provide space to accommodate his ever growing ego and loses many friends as a result. Simultaneously, he creates the iMac and the iPod.

Is designing a computer art? Is leading a team of software developers akin to conducting an orchestra? “Steve Jobs” asks—but ultimately does not answer—these questions. For the character of Jobs, however, the answer is obvious. Periodically throughout the film, Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) objects to Jobs’ notion that he is some kind of artist. “Computers aren’t paintings”, he says. Steve Jobs has a simple reply: “Fuck you.”

—Andrew J. Wilcox can be reached at andrew.wilcox@thecrimson.com.