Was Steve Jobs really a genius?

Steve Jobs is a film about a man in whom I have little interest, but for 120 minutes I was at least quite interested, which is a result. But this doesn’t make it a great film, and in many ways it isn’t. It never quite pins Jobs down. It never quite works out what it wishes to say about him. That he was such a ‘genius’ it didn’t matter if he was also a bit of a dick? Or that it did matter, totally? Plus, the ending is calamitous. But it is well made, and the performances are ace, as is the dialogue, and I was kept interested, so the journey may well be worthwhile, even if the destination is not.

Directed by Danny Boyle, this is from a script by Aaron Sorkin who, among much else (The West Wing, Moneyball, Charlie Wilson’s War), also wrote The Social Network about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, with whom Jobs (who was CEO of Apple until his death — my mother wouldn’t know!) seems to have had much in common, if the two films are to be believed. Principally, both perfectly comprehended how people might wish to communicate, without having the faintest idea how to communicate themselves. How do you feel, the mother of Jobs’s child asks him at one point, about me and our daughter being on welfare, when Time says your stock is valued at $410 million? ‘The stock,’ he replies, not with deliberate cruelness, but because it’s his world-view, ‘is undervalued.’ He had previously denied his daughter’s paternity, even after a DNA test had proved he was the father. Not a touchy-feely man, in other words, and one with absolutely no care for the feelings of others, but as played by Michael Fassbender, who is riveting, you understand that he doesn’t understand what he’s not understanding.