Steve Jobs

STEVE JOBS   ***

Danny Boyle

2015

IDEA:  A look at Apple pioneer Steve Jobs through the prism of three of his product launches in 1984, 1988, and 1998.

BLURB:  There is an overdetermined, showboating quality to Steve Jobs that feels both excessive and befitting the story of a self-anointed deity-cum-corporate giant who hawked his product like it was the Second Coming, even when it had not an ounce of consumer utility. That is to say, the film is as frustrating for its overcooked dramaturgy as it is compelling for its depiction, and perhaps occasional embodiment of, megalomania. It is not Boyle who indulges here: the typically flashy director seems to have handed the reins over almost wholesale to Aaron Sorkin, who splurges on his patented rapid-fire dialogue with its endless shouting matches, recriminations, and metaphors. Oh, the metaphors. Sorkin’s tendency to underline theme by having characters analogize is at its most unrestrained here, resulting in contrivances and heavy-handed attempts at imposing meaning. And yet, his script revolves around an idea that cuts through some of the pomposity: that Jobs, wounded by rejection and human fallibility and gripped by a need for control, sought to create an inviolate technology that would be better than us. It’s a poignant concept Sorkin – and a scorchingly possessed Michael Fassbender – play to complicated effect. They manage to maintain an ambivalence about Jobs that makes us question why and how we vaunt individuals, and what it is about them that drives our culture into the future.