Precisely the Jobs You Imagined

Jobs
Directed by Joshua Michael Stern
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

It’s tough not to watch Joshua Michael Stern’s “Jobs”, the messianic biopic of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, without recalling David Fincher’s masterful “The Social Network” from a few years ago. The two films side by side are like an expose on what separates an average film from a great one. Both are about great entrepreneurs in the tech world that revolutionized the ways that people communicate with one another, who themselves were deeply isolated and socially challenged in some way. Fincher’s Mark Zuckerberg was painted as a kind of Charlie Kane, a man who gained it all and felt the hollow fruits of his success. But Stern’s Jobs (Ashton Kutcher, in a surprisingly effecting performance) is a man who had it all figured out, possessed of an almost prophetic knowledge of the world he had yet to witness, grew up a little bit, and existed largely as a siren for the limitless frontier of digital technology.

This is, certainly, a film that loves Steve Jobs deeply. One can almost applaud the bravery in the sparing moments when Stern dares to inject complexity into the Jobs persona, but these moments effectively serve only to punctuate the intervening time when Stern is painting the man with broad strokes of almost obnoxious brilliance. How many speeches can a single man give about ‘having a vision’, or ‘changing the world’, or ‘believing in this idea’? An early moment when Jobs turns away his pregnant girlfriend threatens to be the only moment of humanity he is provided, but a nice redemptive moment later brings both the girl and the daughter back for a moment of pleasant intimacy.

“Jobs” is very much about Apple, the company Jobs founded with Steve Wozniak in 1976. Apple is the current through which Jobs’ vision was channeled. The film details the early days, when Jobs, employed by Atari, discovered the closeted brilliance of his friend Wozniak (Josh Gad), who had casually assembled the rudimentary components of the first personal computer in his living room. Wozniak’s modest invention incited a wave of potential in Jobs, whose drive and vision pushed the two of them first into Jobs’ parents’ garage and then into the forefront of consumer electronics.

The rest of the movie will take place within the Apple campus, frequently within the boardroom after the company had gone public, when Jobs’ perfectionism and ambition clashed with his shareholders, who felt his business model was too risky and preferred a safer, less innovative route.

Wozniak is clearly the eye of morality here, a soft spoken man who sought the modest pleasure of creation and tinkering with his gadgets in the face of  Jobs’ relentless ambition and his own company’s skyrocketing success. He is one of many casualties in Apple’s rise, which slowly left behind many of the men we meet in that garage. Jobs, like this film, has not the time to eulogize their departures. One of the reasons “Jobs” feels a little flat, or packs little punch, is that it fails to adequately feel the weight of Jobs’ losses, or the harsh circumstances of his meteoric rise. Stern does not tell us much we did not already know. Steve Jobs was a great innovator, possessed of an astonishingly forward thinking vision.  That he had little time for a personal life hardly seems like the adequate basis for a drama.