On Steve Jobs, the Movie

I watched Steve Jobs at my local theater. Twice. The first time, aside from a few elderly couples, the theater was largely empty. The second time, I rushed back, afraid they would take it off the floor soon — and I wouldn’t get the full cinematic effect ever again. Since then, both director Danny Boyle and writer Aaron Sorkin have spoken about the movie’s fate in several interviews, notably with The Hollywood Reporter. Steve Jobs simply couldn’t find an audience.

Critics who liked the movie attribute this to timing. In a year packed with cerebral cinema, Steve Jobs simply did not stand out, especially after the failure of the last Jobs biopic. A harsher criticism is that the movie treats its subject, Steve Jobs, unfairly. That Aaron Sorkin is cynical about Jobs and Michael Fassbender portrays the man as some irredeemable maniac that the audience cannot connect with. “The man was not all bad,” states a review for the movie on Amazon.

It’s the second criticism that I find difficult to understand. It’s simply not true. Throughout the movie, Michael Fassbender, as Jobs, is an exacting megalomaniac, yes, driven to create the perfect machine at the cost of his ex-wife and daughter — but he is continuously challenged by them, too, on this exact point. And by Joanna Hoffman, played by Kate Winslet, who hovers around him like a batty grandmother.

Throughout the three acts that make the movie, Fassbender appears perturbed, both as the genius who “isn’t getting his due” and by the fact that others value human relationships over the perfect computer. At Job’s core, the film says, is burning rage at being rejected at birth, first by his biological parents and then by his original adoptive parents (Job was eventually adopted a second time by the folks he identified as his parents). But what could an infant do, he asks in the movie, that the parents who took him home would want to give him back?

Perhaps the real Steve Jobs was motivated by more than just parental rejection — but it certainly suffices for the narrative needs of a movie. The pain is deeply felt — in a way, it’s quite Voldermort-y, especially when we learn that Jobs frequents his biological father’s restaurant without the old man knowing Jobs is his son. This is a character in-capable of love, as Dumbledore explains to Harry Potter, because he was not made with love. If Aaron Sorkin ever read that comparison, I suspect he might faint.

Regardless, these daddy-issues drive Michael Fassbender’s Jobs to seek a Silicon Valley version of apotheosis by betraying his friends and ritual patricide — treacherously replacing Jeff Daniels playing ill-fated Apple CEO John Scully. Jobs continually rejects his own paternity publicly, including in an interview with Time and when he does accept his daughter, is furious at what he sees as a betrayal — she sells a house that he bought specifically for her.

So yes, Fassbender’s Jobs isn’t someone you might want to FaceTime with. But there is something tragic here, that inability to connect, to experience love in the most basic of human relationships. In the last act, however, technical perfection can no longer triumph human connection — especially when his rejection of her forces his daughter to reject him, too.

Fassbender’s Job talks it out with John Scully and we all know that sometimes a son replaces a father in the same way Aurangzeb did Shah Jahan. Jobs also faces his considerable narcissism and is humbled — smartly connected to the Time article — thanks to a Joanna Hoffan/Kate Winslet meltdown. In the penultimate scene, he reconciles with his daughter on the rooftop of the building where the next Apple product is being launched. “I’m poorly made,” he says, acknowledging his flaws as a parent and jumping headfirst into our cesspool of common human grief. You may even be tempted to give him a hug. Or shake his hand.

In short, the character grows.

They don’t have to, always, in art. But in this movie, they do.