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“The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that
day;
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to
play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the
same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game …
Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty
yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat …”
—Ernest Thayer, “Casey at the Bat”
The year is 1984. Outside a huge convention center in
California, droves of patrons eagerly await the launch of Steve Jobs’ (Michael
Fassbender) baby: the Macintosh computer. Critics say it doesn’t do anything,
and that people will not like that it is a closed system—incompatible with all
non-Macintosh hardware and software (which aptly represents Jobs’
my-way-or-the-highway mentality). Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen) begs Jobs to give more
attention to Apple’s workhorse money-maker, the Apple 2. But Jobs is his baby’s
shill. The Mac is simple and user friendly, he insists. And a million will be
sold in the first 90 days. Jobs was wrong, his critics right. Strike one.
The year is 1988. Another crowd anticipates Jobs’ new
creation. Jobs is no longer at Apple. He has a new company and a new computer:
NeXT. It’s pretty. But critics say it doesn’t do anything. Wozniak insists that
NeXT will fail. Jobs pushes it anyway. Again, Jobs was wrong, his critics
right. Strike two.
The year is 1998. A crowd is lined up once again. Jobs is
back at Apple. He sold them NeXT’s operating system and made them take him in
the deal. He stripped and rebuilt his old, flagging company, and put all its
hopes on his latest brainchild: The iMac. He got one more pitch—one more ball
to swing at. But this time, unlike Casey, Jobs doesn’t miss.
What kept him from striking out in the bottom of the ninth?
Luck? Fate? Was it all part of his plan? Did he whiff a couple of times on
purpose just to set up the pitcher? Or was it pure grit? Was his pride and
thirst for recognition so strong that he simply willed the ball over the fence?
Who knows. It is hard to distinguish the man from the legend
when it comes to Steve Jobs (partly because of his chameleon-like adaptability).
And I doubt there is any point in asking whether the Steve Jobs of “Steve Jobs”
depicts the real Steve Jobs. What’s important is that there is this
character—this really interesting and compelling, yet enigmatic character.
And boy, is there this character. Michael Fassbender
provides the raw materials and director Danny Boyle does some shaping, but it
is writer Aaron Sorkin who breathes the breath of life. His Jobs is archetypal
yet somehow real. Sorkin once remarked that he likes hearing his smarter
friends talking. This makes it sound like Sorkin doesn’t really understand what
they are saying. Yet, whether or not he understands the content of their
conversations, man, does he get them.
Just as Yeats, Thoreau, Homer and Einstein somehow evinced an exceptional familiarity
with the world around them—a world which they were in awe of and knew they
could never fully describe or grasp—so too Sorkin once again shows how he
understands his subjects, and how, with great artistry, he can reveal them to
us without reducing or simplifying them.
This movie so engagingly invites us to ask: What makes Jobs
Jobs? There is no simple answer. Jobs is ambitious, persistent, shrewd, egotistical,
stubborn, sarcastic, self-centered, mean, brilliant, and almost certainly a
lunatic. But it is way more nuanced than that. At one point Jobs describes
himself as “indifferent”. But this is not quite right. Sure, at times he
behaves with what seems like cold indifference, but concern always finds a way
to creep in. He ends up giving the money, remembering the comment, noticing
what he seemed to be ignoring.
And yet there are more sinister subtleties, like when Jobs offhandedly
but sincerely resents there being a certain “offer the devil never made me”. Like
his soul is on the market—he’s just waiting for Lucifer’s call.
At one point Wozniak says the difference between him and
Jobs is Jobs is an “asshole”. I like this description. It suggests he is mean in
an arrogant and selfish way. That seems about right. But even this gets
complicated in the end.
Again, I don’t really care whether any of this speaks to the
real Steve Jobs. “Steve Jobs” is a movie about a character. It is a terrifically
rendered character. You not only want to watch him and learn what makes him
tick, you also want to think about what this character represents—what he says
about us.
The Steve Jobs of “Steve Jobs” does that. He is one of the
best film characters in a long while.
