For a story to work it must have a dramatic arc, it must satisfy in the oldest of manners, thesis, antithesis, synthesis and new thesis and with biography it doesn’t always work that way so it is up to the person who has the vision of the biography to lay down how the story is the story, and that is the biggest failure of “Jobs”, the story of the visionary tech man who mass produced two of the biggest inventions of the past 50 years before dying of cancer because he refused to get help in time.
Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs is believable with a steely stare, a hard will, and a curious unkindness as he races to his premature death in a whirl of short hand film making. Here he is in India, now he is eating fruit, there he is in Daddy’s garage with Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) and then again in a board meeting getting voted out of Apple. Finally, throwing away his CD Walkman in frustration.
It isn’t fun, it isn’t enlightening, there is no Jobs there and there is no real private life. I read the biography itself by Walter Isaacson a couple of years ago and if director Joshua Michael Stern had taken any one tack he might have discovered a truth to Jobs life; perhaps taking the adopted boy from childhood to Apple 2 he might have had the time to tell his story but the rush of live enactments is just a whirl of whateverness. Instead you get an Imovie, a sort of slick appliance.
All power to Ashton for scowling his ass off but he doesn’t manage to make Jobs change at all, he is the exact same man at the beginning as he is at the end, a stubborn dick -there are a lot of people like that and it doesn’t explain the man at all. A real waste of an opportunity.
Grade: C