Musings on... Steve Jobs

The biopic is a troublesome genre. By its nature the limitations placed on the story are vast. If you know the story beforehand (which you often will, because big Hollywood biopics will most often be made about big Hollywood-friendly personalities), you’ve effectively lost all tension related to the plot; you know the ending already, and a lot of the steps preceding it. Even if you don’t know the story, the very fact that it’s centred in reality removes a world of possibilities (ghosts, aliens, time travel, etc.).

Of course, biopics don’t struggle at the box office, or, notably, at the Academy Awards. In her Extras cameo Kate Winslet may have famously identified one sure-fire way to win an Oscar, but a close competitor must surely be to appear in a big biopic. See: Ray, Walk the Line, Gandhi, Amadeus, Capote, etc. etc. All accomplished films in their own rights, no doubt, but all formulaic in the way they follow their protagonists from cradle to grave, or at cradle to salvation and a happy, Hollywood-friendly ending.

Enter Steve Jobs (the film). Screenwriter extraordinaire Aaron Sorkin, joint-creator of The West Wing (for which we must all be eternally grateful), eschews this well-worn path and instead forges his own. The typical cradle to grave biopic tends to cram as much as possible into the two hour running time: here’s how their parents influenced them; here’s when they were a child genius; here’s when they met their sweetheart, fell in love, married, had difficulties, worked through them; here’s their big break; here’s the peak of their fame; here’s where things got too much for them; here’s when they came back and were more famous and beloved than ever before and guess what they became really nice people in the end too. Sorkin’s version, by contrast, is incredibly limited in its structure. The entire film consists of only three scenes, each of which plays out in real time, and each of which occurs in the immediate build-up to one of Jobs’ famous product launches, in 1984, 1988 and 1998.

The comparison which first springs to mind is Inglorious Basterds, which had a similarly constricted structure and dialogue-heavy approach. This won’t be a long diversion - in his most fervent dreams Tarantino couldn’t hope to be the writer that Sorkin is. The end.

To those who don’t know much about Jobs the man, who only know him by his products and by the pictures of him in a black turtleneck and round glasses smiling kindly or stroking his chin, the abrasive tone with which the film begins will come as a shock. When we first see Jobs, before the launch of the Macintosh, he is a tightly-wound coil of arrogance, anticipation and anger, set to explode in a foul-mouthed tirade at anyone around him who doesn’t live up to his outlandishly high standards.  

The tension which the film places upon itself, by adopting the aforementioned structure and by introducing Jobs as such an aggressive and dislikeable character, is whether or not it’s subsequently possible to execute satisfying character development in only three scenes. If you didn’t happen to have Danny Boyle, Aaron Sorkin and Michael Fassbender in the three most crucial positions (oh, and throw six-time Oscar nominee and onetime winner Kate Winslet into a crucial supporting role), the answer would almost certainly be no. With those three in place, however, it becomes a more interesting question.

Don Draper once said that ‘People don’t change’. When we’re talking about change in relation to Steve Jobs, it needs to be clarified that we’re not talking about Saul on the road to Damascus. But he does change. He starts out outlandishly demanding and callous, and becomes marginally less so over the course of the fourteen years. The weaknesses, if you want to call them that, still remain, because fundamentally he remains the same person as most of us do. He never stops believing himself to be superior, and why should he? This is a man who changed the course of computing and the world, and who was very much aware of that fact at the time. What he starts to become more aware of over the years, however, is that his behaviour might alienate his daughter. She is the true heart of the film, which is otherwise relatively devoid of emotion. And while that doesn’t seem like such a big deal to him when he’s young and she’s very young, and he’s even denying his own paternity, maybe it starts to matter more and more as he gets older and she gets older.

The creators of this film have made incredibly bold decisions. The great Steve Jobs film, whether documentary or feature length, was still waiting to be created. And the structure and tone of this film won’t endear it to the general public, or, probably, to the awards voters. It’s difficult. But it is an ambitious, original, brave piece of work. And when Fassbender’s Jobs steps out onto that stage in 1998 to launch the iMac, and to seal his legacy and the stamp he made on an entire generation and the history of computing, and a thousand lightbulbs go off and he turns to smile back at the camera before the proverbial curtain comes down, there is a release of emotion that’s been pent up for the past two hours, whether you realised it or not, and you feel like you’ve seen something unlike anything you’ve seen before.