Mac and cheese: Why Steve Jobs doesn't work

Aaron Sorkin's screenwriting style is distinct and recognizable almost immediately - characters speak very fast, with lots of quips and barbs and ironic observations and witty retorts - all the time under great pressure, whether int the West Wing, a newsroom, or the board room. You either like his style or you don't, and I have not been a big fan - most of the time I'm thinking, yes, funny, good line, well written, but nobody speaks like this: he gives the illusion of documentary reality but in fact his work is completely fictive. (One notable exception: In Social Network for the first time I thought, yes, these super-high-IQ-nerd-competitive narcissists maybe to speak like an Aaron Sorkin script.) We get more of Sorkin's unlikely dialogue throughout the Danny Boyle-directed Steve Jobs (2015), and for all the frenzy it's a dud of a movie. What worked in Social Network does not work here: there's no obvious antagonist to Jobs except himself, we don't really root for him or care for him, in fact we dislike him pretty intensely much as we may like his products, and there's just not all that much drama in the battle to resurrect the near-moribund Apple as there was watching a start-up rise from nothing. The guiding concept that drives the movie had some potential, as the entire film is structured around several (4?) product unveilings - beginning with the Mac and building up to the iMac (there's a rather clumsy hint at the future of the iPhone - they were smart I think not to bring the movie up to the present, not even in the closing credits). The pattern, however, becomes dull and repetitous; each product event seen entirely from the backstage, much like actors before a big show (can't help but think Birdman was a big influence on Boyle's style here, with lots of movement backstage and some long tracking shots as the characters speak while rushing along ill-lit corridors, e.g.). Problem is it's one thing to imagine an atmosphere for potential crisis w/ a million people wanting the attention of the head honcho if the honcho is, say, the U.S. President, but these back-stage dramas - with a hapless Kate Winslet constantly saying Jobs has to be ready in one minute - seem absurd, far removed from normal or even abnormal human behavior. Yes, Jobs was a flawed human being but do we really care? Do we really care that he's a tyrant to his underlings, indifferent to his colleagues (Seth Rogen is cast perfectly as Wozniak, in on the ground floor and unable to see the vision beyond the relic of the Apple 2), and a distant present to his daughter? He made Apple into the most successful company in the world, almost single-handedly it would seem, but this movie doesn't make him into a real presence and - other than a reminder that at one time Apple looked like a company on the brink - the movie doesn't tell us any more than we already know or need to know about technology, design, marketing, corporate politics, or people.