Jobs and emptiness
The film about the founder of the “Apple” company – computer genius Steve Jobs has been released. There were rumors before that the film about Jobs will be directed by the producer of Fight Club David Fincher, who made a good presentation, as we all well remember, of the Facebook creator biography in his film The Social Network. In any case, the scriptwriter of The Social Network (awarded for his work with Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Oscar) Aaron Sorkin is, in fact, now working on screen transcription of the book by Walter Issacson Steve Jobs. The name of the director is unknown at the moment, but, while the masters are busy with leisurely work, prompt and mobile opportunists move ahead.
Biopic (film biography) Jobs: The Empire of Temptation (the original title – jOBS) was created, in fact, by beginner filmmakers. No masterpieces have been previously observed in the career of the film director Joshua Michael Stern, who has directed three full-length feature films, and for the scriptwriter Matt Whiteley this is his first production. The plot covers the major conflicts of the life of Steve Jobs from the early 1970s until the 2000s. Both the wide audience and cinematic community are clearly interested in the subject: jOBS was a closing film of this year’s prestigious forum of independent films “Sundance” (US).
Clearly feeling the pressure of the producers, who tried to get ahead of everyone by all means, Stern and Whiteley did nothing sophisticated: with diligence of a school student they recreated all the major events in the life of the protagonist. Cinematic Jobs is doing everything he is supposed to do according to the canons: acts like a hippie, rebels, walks around the university barefoot, does not think about business, then organizes a company with funny and shaggy Wozniak in a garage, puts on his first costume and gets his first success, leaves the company due to the scheming of dishonest partners, travels to India seeking enlightenment, revives, gets rich, produces nice-looking and expensive cars, purchased by people with increasing delight. Nothing of that hasn’t been known before. Besides, Ashton Kutcher looks very much like Jobs.
It seems that, something significant gets lost in this diligence. It is one thing to make a remake of the biography filmed by all mass media hundred times, and a totally different thing to create a full-blooded image. Jobs created by Stern and Whiteley is not all that interesting not only because Kutcher does not progress in his acting further from outward resemblance, but also because the entire story from the first to the last frame remains a monotonous list of facts without the slightest effort to gain the insight into the facts.
The accuracy of conveying the facts is the last thing to be done by a filmmaker, this should be left for television programs. The important thing is the level of universality set in the production, which should fascinate even those, who have never even heard about “Apple.” Jobs was a man, who created himself, he did not just love computers, but he also turned them into a kind of an art. He paid a great price for his success, there was just as much rejection and even hatred around him as the adoration. Most of the biopics lack such character – full of contradictions, who leads his personal, not always visible to the rest of the world, war. That’s the kind of a character that was presented in the film The Social Network – even though he wasn’t looking very much like the real Mark Zuckerberg, this was not as important. And Jobs in The Empire of Temptation remains only a plot scheme – saturated by external events, but essentially empty.
Now we came back to where we started. Sorkin refused the worn out form of biographical dotted line, which was used by Whiteley and Stern. The scriptwriter of The Social Network outlines the basis of the film as three 30-minute episodes that unfold in real time. Each of these pieces is dedicated to the events that precede the implementation of Jobs’ major projects – release of the first computer “Macintosh,” the start of NEXT Company after Jobs left “Apple,” and the presentation of iPod. You really get a desire to watch such film – regardless of the final result, which, it seems, will still be very convincing.
