In their approaches to history, Joshua Michael Stern’s Jobs and Lee Daniels’ The Butler could hardly be less similar. The former is an example of Victorian-style great-man biography, updated for the iThings era. The latter observes monumental events, mostly involving the civil rights movement, from an Everyman’s perspective.
Yet the two movies have much in common. Neither seriously exerts itself to examine psychology or illustrate character. Nor does either offer significant challenges to conventional wisdom. Instead, they proceed as historical pageants, re-creating rather than reinterpreting the events they depict.
Although some of Steve Jobs’ former associates have already complained about Stern’s biopic, the movie generally conforms to the known facts of the Apple co-founder’s career. The filmmakers even shot in Jobs’ childhood home, whose garage became one of the world’s most celebrated.
In fact this merely serviceable film tells the story in such detail that it doesn’t have room for Jobs’ late-career triumphs. Save for a prologue set in 2001, the movie follows its flawed hero only from 1976, when he’s a Reed College dropout who still hangs around the campus, to 1996, when he returns to a foundering Apple after an 11-year exile.
Along the way, Jobs alienates most of the people who helped him, notably Steve Wozniak (a fine Josh Gad), who did a lot more than his ambitious buddy to develop the Apples I and II. He also clashes with original financial backer Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney) and the man he himself recruited to save Apple in the 1980s, John Scully (Matthew Modine).