What Sorkin and Boyle have to offer is not a warts-and-all portrait but the suggestion that there is something heroic about a wart.
.. The best reason to see it is Kate Winslet: she plays Joanna Hoffman, who was a wizard of Apple marketing and one of the few hardy souls who could stand up to Jobs. Bit by bit, armed with large spectacles, a punchy accent, and dark unlovely hair, she becomes the movie’s anchor, quelling its tonal excesses much as Hoffman reined in the savage temper of Jobs.
In ‘Steve Jobs,’ Tolerating Tech’s Unpleasant Visionaries
“Steve Jobs” is not very kind to Steve Jobs. He is presented as a man who spent years denying paternity of his daughter and who later only grudgingly paid for her support. At every turn, he treats employees and colleagues as expendable cogs in his corporate game, often without understanding the damage he inflicts on those around him.
The Revision of Steve Jobs
It is probably also why the man who helped to will those products into existence has become not just a kind of secular saint, but also a figure whom history has already included in its pantheon of world-changing inventors. Gutenberg, Darwin, Edison … and Steve Jobs.
.. All of which makes it tempting to ignore another thing about Steve Jobs: He could be, on top of so much else, a terrible person. Not just a jerk, occasionally and innocuously, but a bully and a tyrant.
.. They suggest that Jobs’s failings as a person, rather than impeding his legend, actually bolstered it. His uncompromising vision, his unapologetic bullying, his tendency to prioritize the needs of computers over the needs of people—all of that, the lore goes, was somehow necessary. Jobs’s assholery, like his mock turtlenecks and his New Balance running shoes, made him who he was, and thus helped to make Apple what it was. Jobs could be a jerk in the normative sense because he could be a jerk in the narrative. His successes justified his failings.
.. Each summation, each person, is a reminder of the sacrifices Jobs imposed on others in the name of human connection. As Gibney puts it: “How much of an asshole do you have to be, to be successful?”
.. Jobs was, maybe, a Great Man who was also, in many ways, a small child: self-absorbed and desperate to please, those two things not contradicting but instead, in ways productive and not, informing each other.
.. We don’t really know, mostly because these Great Men did their Great Things in the age before video, before social media, before depositions and the documentaries that convert their proceedings into media. They lived in a time that afforded people the luxury of being remembered, and defined, for the What of their lives rather than the Who.
.. He lived in a time—we live in a time—when a new holism is being brought to bear on history, when our assessments of our heroes can take into account not just their achievements, but their smaller, human-scaled contributions.