When I was in the first bloom of youth, it was decreed that I learn computer programming at a Bangalore institution then called Apple. While learning nothing, I made several friends and we were all dismayed when one of them, an affable Nigerian lad, was shot dead by the police in a cinematic chase down M. G. Road after it turned out that he was a drug peddler. In my professional life, I have always used Macs, and ever since Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, I have been a slave to it. However, when the time arrived to invest in a tablet, I decided not to put all my electronic eggs in the Apple basket and got myself a BlackBerry PlayBook and shifted soon enough to a series of Android tablets.
Given the dominance of Apple products in my quotidian life (no, I have no plans of getting an Apple Watch, as I fail to see its utility), it was with considerable curiosity that I went to watch Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs , the closing night film of the 59th BFI London Film Festival. If you are expecting a straightforward biopic, the film is not for you. If you are a fan of Boyle’s kinetic technique, you will be disappointed. And if you are a Jobs fangirl/boy, stay far away from the film. If you are a fan of Aaron Sorkin’s writing, as I am, surge to the cinema in droves when it releases. The film is structured around the behind-the-scenes madness leading up to three product launches — the Macintosh in 1984, the NeXT Cube in 1988 and the iMac in 1998. Jobs confronts or is confronted by those who used to be close to him and the result is vintage Sorkin dialogue — dense, swirling, and full of snappy retorts and inventive put-downs. Indeed, the film has so many one-liners and quotable quotes that you need to watch the film a second time in order to delight in them properly, much in the manner of the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933).
Unlike The Social Network (2010), Sorkin’s other biopic that really isn’t, the writer here adds a dollop of sentimentality that produces some genuinely moving moments. The film’s cause is immeasurably helped by the fact that the actors, led by the magisterial Michael Fassbender as Jobs, really get into Sorkin’s words, savouring the dialogue before spitting them out. Sorkin’s tonal problem remains. Since everybody gets smart lines, they end up sounding the same; but this is where the fine cast, including Kate Winslet, Jeff Daniels and Seth Rogen, weighs in and creates the differences in characters.
While on the subject, Alex Gibney’s documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015) is well worth a look. Here too, like in the Sorkin/Boyle film, the Apple man does not come across as a very nice person — vainglorious is a kind way to describe him. While not exactly disparaging the dead, these films do provide an alternative point of view to a man who has touched millions of lives across the globe.