The culture’s veneration of Steve Jobs — co-founder of the Apple microcomputer empire, pitchman of every gadgeteer’s dreams — confirms this era’s secular idolatry. The new movie Steve Jobs confirms how bad a big-budget bio-pic can be.
Half of the film’s impact comes from its pedigree: It is based on the official biography by the prominent journalist Walter Isaacson and directed by the Oscar-winning British filmmaker Danny Boyle from a screenplay by TV potentate Aaron Sorkin. It is as impossible to ignore their collaboration as it was impossible that it would work. These men of the zeitgeist identify with Jobs’s hubris and show hip reverence in line with today’s sycophancy, rather than exploring the cultural quandary of why the world has sold its soul to a manufacturer of sleekly designed products — a new religion disguised as a technological revolution.
The film’s worshipful triumvirate uses a flashback structure to tell Jobs’s life story as if preserving it in digital-era holy writ. (Boyle likes large-scale graphic displays, mixed-media imagery, and lookee camera movements.) History is recalled — and therefore unquestioned — through three stockholder presentations, years apart (for the Apple computer, the Next, and the iMac), where the iconic Jobs (Michael Fassbender) struts his stuff among mere mortals.
These presentations are like evangelical tent revivals. Jobs’s showy arrogance and the stockholders’ hosannas evoke Sermon on the Mount rapture. Geeks and investors genuflect before the man who burnished their dreams. Meanwhile, backstage, we see the mess of his private life: He demeans his co-workers, including inventor Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), and his publicist, Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), and resists the emotional claims of his out-of-wedlock daughter, Lisa (Makenzie Moss as Lisa at age five, then Perla Haney-Jardine at age 19).
But what exactly did Jobs do to earn such ceremony? Sorkin’s awful script raises then glides past that question. In his recent films The Social Network and Moneyball, Sorkin created a lives-of-the-saints series geared to tabloid obsession. Jobs’s celebrity becomes Sorkin’s tautology: Jobs is great because he’s great. Big Boss. Supersalesman. Visionary Capitalist. (This mystique helps explain the adoration for Pixar, the digital animation company Jobs sold to the Disney corporation, and why its mediocre, formulaic films are greeted with messianic fealty.)
--Armond White in
National Review, 9 Oct. 2015.
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