Steve Jobs was an inventor, innovator and artist, but he was a businessman, and he sold and marketed computers for a living. He was not a filmmaker, painter, sculptor, musician or anything of the sort, and yet people would not bat an eye at calling him the Michelangelo or the Picasso of our day. The biopic “Jobs” is set only on portraying him as that mad genius. It replaces what he stood for with glossy eyed monologues and his backstory with Apple’s greatest hits.
Jobs (Ashton Kutcher) as seen here was a tyrant, a brilliant tyrant who demanded perfection and dreamed up the non-existent but was held back by the investors who didn’t applaud him, the shareholders and board members who ousted him and the team members who didn’t share his lofty ambitions. He hastily fired those who disagreed with him, neglected his friends like Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) who helped him build Apple in his parents’ basement and infuriated the people like Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney) who showed up on his doorstep one day and bankrolled his visionary ideas.
Joshua Michael Stern’s film acknowledges that Jobs was a controversial figure, even an asshole when it came to management, but it never doubts that he was a mastermind. It begins with Jobs introducing the iPod to his staff. Lens flares abound, an orchestra swells, and at the mention of having created a music player, the room bursts into applause. Continue reading “Jobs”