Steve Jobs (2015)

The trials of Jobs

Welcome back to our near-infinite series in which we re-watch the complete works of Aaron Sorkin in timeline order. We are getting close to the end! (You can find earlier entries here.)

Steve Jobs shows us three moments in the life of the late tech entrepreneur and Apple legend Steve Jobs (played by Michael Fassbender). Each moment falls just before a product launch: for the Apple Mac in 1984, the NeXT computer in 1988, and the iMac in 1998. As he prepares for his big moment on stage at each event, Jobs wrangles with his marketing executive and foil Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), his old friend and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogan), the Apple corporation itself, his erstwhile CEO John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), and most of all his young daughter Lisa (Makenzie Moss/Ripley Sobo/Perla Haney-Jardine).

This piece has taken far too long to write given that we don’t have much to say. We’ve had unbearable Sorkin (Newsroom), and we’ve had stone-cold brilliant Sorkin (Season 2 of The West Wing, obvs). But we weren’t prepared for wholly unmemorable Sorkin. Steve Jobs feels like a Ron Howard film (and we don’t mean Apollo 13); it’s well made, well performed and just, well, fine.

Jobs ought to have worked. It was the third Sorkin film in a row to focus on a difficult man changing the world, and the previous two came out great. The Social Network is the story of a man who has a difficult relationship with relationships, and who changes the way we all relate to each other. Moneyball tells the story of a man with a difficult relationship with baseball, and who changes the way everyone plays baseball. Jobs is the story of a man who has a difficult relationship with his family, and who changes the way we use computers.

Wait, what?

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Jobs asks which thing Steve Jobs loved more: his daughter, Lisa, or Apple Computers. Sorkin evidently chose the three product launches in the film to coincide with three key moments in Jobs’s relationship with Lisa. (They sure as hell aren’t the three most technologically significant Apple/Jobs launches; the iPhone was launched years after the film ends.)

• Act One has Jobs publicly denying paternity of six-year-old Lisa just before launching the Apple Mac. The Mac was the personal computer Jobs took over after he was booted from his pet project: a computer codenamed ‘Lisa’. Jobs maintains that the name is a coincidence.

• Act Two sees nine-year-old Lisa reconciled with her father after he has been fired from Apple.

• Act Three has Lisa in her early 20s, enduring a semi-hostile relationship with Jobs who is now back at Apple and about to launch the iMac.

Indeed, Sorkin called Lisa the ‘heroine of the film’.

So OK, at heart this film is about Jobs’s relationship with Lisa. That could be interesting, right?