Jobs (2013)

Jobs arrives in 2013 with the solemnity of a museum placard and the pacing of a cable rerun, tracing Steve Jobs from Reed College dropout to the iPod unveiling with grim corporate efficiency. Ashton Kutcher does the walk, the stare, the fruit-only diet of the soul. The structure is rise, fall, rise, a blueprint so familiar that the audience can set a watch by it. What the film declines to do is argue with anything. It presents the garage, the venture capital, the boardroom coup, and the eventual vindication as natural weather, and asks us to admire the man who survived it.

The picture's engagement with social consciousness is limited almost entirely to its supporting cast. Victor Rasuk, Masi Oka, and Nelson Franklin appear among the engineers, doing competent work in roles that neither comment on nor complicate the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male history being dramatized. This is casting as wallpaper: present, unobtrusive, never asked to carry meaning. Every other marker of contemporary cultural awareness is simply absent. There is no critique of the fortune being assembled on screen, no feminist reading of the women who drift through Jobs's life as inconveniences, no framing of his volatility as anything but genius with poor manners.

What remains is a film that regards its subject with the reverence of a shareholder meeting. It takes liberties with the record, as biopics do, but the liberties serve drama, not ideology. Nobody lectures us. Nobody explains how we ought to feel about corporate power or the people it grinds up along the way. The film's only sermon is the one it does not preach, and that silence is, in its own incurious fashion, the most honest thing about it.