The biggest argument between the titular Steve Jobs and Steve “Woz” Wozniak, besides whether Jobs (Michael Fassbender) should ever thank the Apple II team, is whether or not Apple products should be closed systems. Woz (Seth Rogen) thinks people want the customization that open systems provide: more slots, more ports, and more options to command their machine’s capabilities. “Computers aren’t paintings,” he says.
Jobs insists that computers are works of art and that not only should people not get a say in what the artist creates, people don’t know what they want until the artist creates it. Jobs wants a closed system so he can be a computer auteur. He wants, “End to end control. Completely incompatible with anything else.” At the unveiling of the translucent blue-green iMac G3, Jobs calls out, “How’s that for a compromise, Woz? You still can’t get into it, but you can see into it.”
“Fair enough,” Woz yells back. And just as Aaron Sorkin hangs the entire movie on the concept of Jobs getting into arguments with the same 5 people before 3 product launches throughout time (the Macintosh, the NeXT, and the iMac G3), I will hang my entire thinking about this movie on a singular Jobs quote. Because for Steve Jobs, Sorkin built a closed system in which he could enact the most Sorkin-like control over somewhat unwieldy material. And even though I never really got into it, I could see that it was nicely constructed.
Steve Jobs has a structure that’s incompatible with most films. By confining the action to flurried backstage goings-on before separate product launches, Sorkin renders the life of Jobs in his favorite mode: pre-performance. Before a product launch, Jobs can be like a sports anchor, sketch actor or cable news pundit before a broadcast, or like a president before the State of the Union. It’s part three-act play, part Birdman (thankfully eschewing the long takes and jazz), and part A Christmas Carol, with co-workers and family appearing at each launch to impart an iLesson Mini.
Woz challenges Jobs’s god complex. Jobs’s head of marketing and “work-wife” Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet) as well as beleaguered computer scientist Andy Hertzfeld (Michael Stuhlbarg) provide perspective on his daughter Lisa. Apple CEO John Scully (Jeff Daniels) is the adopted Jobs’s complicated father figure. And then there’s Lisa herself — the daughter Jobs initially denied paternity. Lisa is the equivalent of Rooney Mara in The Social Network (2010) as she, in combination with Jobs’s own lack of supportive biological parents, provides Sorkin with a hypothetical symbol for why Jobs is the difficult person he is as well as a path to Jobs’s redemption.
The chief flaw in Sorkin’s closed system is that creating the climatic moments of Jobs’s life in the middle of the three ongoing episodes proves difficult. Director Danny Boyle attempts to create such a moment with Jobs’s famous ouster from Apple in 1985. Despite cross-cutting between flashbacks and a heated argument, shooting in canted angles, and amping up inclement weather and orchestra music, the moment is jarring because viewers are expected to be deeply invested in the conflict between Jobs and Scully at the same time they learn what it actually was. Similarly, Boyle struggles to end the film right after Jobs reconciles with his daughter and right before the product launch that made Apple Apple. He uses enough strobe light to place Jobs on the set of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and enough alternative pop rock to end a Newsroom montage, but it feels more like a signal that the movie’s ending than an ending.
So, is Steve Jobs a work of art or is it just a biography inputted into the closed Sorkin iAdapt Pro? Maybe Steve Jobs is the ultra-functional Steve Jobs biopic that you didn’t know you wanted. Maybe your hacked Steve Jobs wouldn’t be as talky or it’d be more expansive with a less prohibitive structure, but it wouldn’t be better than this.
Logan Eastman is a lifelong PC user.