A-Directed by Matt Johnson Starring Jay Baruchel, Matt Johnson, and Glenn Howerton Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Of 2023’s movies about corporations, Air and Flamin Hot were about victories that, however forward-thinking or innovative, are nonetheless about more dollars flowing into a publicly traded company. Huzzah? BlackBerry, on the other hand, is about a failure, about hubris and compromise and all the other timeless ingredients of tragedies. It therefore doesn’t leave the viewer with a sour taste as the epilogue brags about how much money Nike CEO Phil Knight donated to charity amidst all those unmentioned sweatshop scandals. Matt Johnson’s exceptional film, which he directs, co-writes, and co-stars in, is one of the year’s biggest surprises and a great Canadian achievement. Don’t worry about the World Cup flop or cheering a Nazi on your Parliament floor, hail the existence of BlackBerry!
A prematurely gray Jay Baruchel stars as Mike Lazaridis, the CEO of Research in Motion. This sounds more impressive than it is, as the company operates out of a strip mall and has one contract making modems for a larger company. Best friend and co-founder Doug Fregin (Johnson) is enthusiastic and personable where Lazaridis is timid and noncommittal, with the former running the handful of employees as a gaming club and the latter holed up in the back, uncomfortable with the amount of company time spent on mid-90’s real-time-strategy games but ill-equipped to do anything about it. A sales call takes the RiM crew to the desk of Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), where they pitch him on their cellular device. Brash businessman Balsillie is intrigued but recognizes the two men in front of him as hapless goofs, and when an opening in Balsillie’s resume opens up, he approaches Lazaridis and Fregin with an offer to run their company for them. Fregin worries about the infringement of the little niche he’s carved out as the king of the nerds, but Lazaridis knows what he can and cannot do. He can meticulously engineer computer hardware to take advantage of publicly available bandwidth and telephone signals, but he can’t sell it and he can’t manage people. Balsillie doesn’t know anything about phones or soldering, but he does know about that.
The resulting partnership is never one where Lazaridis and Balsillie warm to each other over drinks. Instead, these two men are incapable of doing the thing their opposite is skilled at, and they stay out of each other’s way. Their synergy is uncharismatic even as both actors are, in very different ways. Baruchel has played serious before, but never as fully embodied as this, where Lazaridis is never totally comfortable and has the body language to show it. Howerton is a fuming alpha male whose rude honesty is a welcome relief to the slimy corporate hacks at larger companies who try to swat down RiM for no other reason than because they can. Left outside is Fregin, brought to doughy life by Johnson. His interests are always the maintenance of his nice little life, and the protection of Lazaridis a few steps behind that. There’s a lived-in sense between the two, where they were both nerds together in childhood but the beefy Fregin could fight off the hockey stick wielding goons while Lazaridis cowered in the corner. The three interests of making the best product, dominating the competition, and creating a fun work environment keep clashing, with each principal on the rise and fall arc along with RiM itself.
A company achieving major success and then failing to innovate beyond its original idea is interesting for a Fortune cover story, but what guarantees BlackBerry’s cinematic success is how trapped its characters become. Lazaridis has simple goals; make a great product that meets a high standard. He’s thwarted at every stage, and the way that Baruchel makes these defeats and compromises into a personal blow is a reliable source of pathos. Very quickly, BlackBerry becomes a Faustian story where short-term success is achieved by guaranteeing long-term failure down the road, such that the noble goal was always impossible. Balsillie is necessary to fend off takeovers and cons that Lazaridis and Fregin were walking into, but his ill-suited nature to a tech company means that he’ll get distracted and be somewhere else when it counts. The capitalist god of the movie is watching overhead, throwing thunderbolts when it’s time for him to collect.
As classically star-crossed as the story comes off, this is also a frequently hilarious movie. Howerton’s eruptions and flabbergasted expressions do a lot of the work here, but so does Fregin’s strange combination of nerd and bro. The film’s events trend toward the absurd, and Johnson’s tone rises, or sinks, to meet them. However, it’s Baruchel who is the big revelation, sympathetic as a man who can only express himself through his engineering. Watching him take in a situation that he deems insufficient, consider what to do about it, and then mentally recognize that he is not capable of turning it around is tough every time, but Baruchel keeps the character from being pathetic. There’s something in his portrayal that prevents Lazaridis from being a figure of fun, and it elevates BlackBerry from a satire into a tragedy. To the extent that Air and Flamin Hot have anything to do with this film other than a similar release date, BlackBerry’s the only one that leaves the viewer with anything approaching genuine feelings towards the central company. There’s something amazing about a tech company that does local manufacturing in a midsize Canadian city beating up on the Silicon Valley big boys. A charmless, white-haired dork who can’t speak up for himself seduced me. This film works. A-
The resulting partnership is never one where Lazaridis and Balsillie warm to each other over drinks. Instead, these two men are incapable of doing the thing their opposite is skilled at, and they stay out of each other’s way. Their synergy is uncharismatic even as both actors are, in very different ways. Baruchel has played serious before, but never as fully embodied as this, where Lazaridis is never totally comfortable and has the body language to show it. Howerton is a fuming alpha male whose rude honesty is a welcome relief to the slimy corporate hacks at larger companies who try to swat down RiM for no other reason than because they can. Left outside is Fregin, brought to doughy life by Johnson. His interests are always the maintenance of his nice little life, and the protection of Lazaridis a few steps behind that. There’s a lived-in sense between the two, where they were both nerds together in childhood but the beefy Fregin could fight off the hockey stick wielding goons while Lazaridis cowered in the corner. The three interests of making the best product, dominating the competition, and creating a fun work environment keep clashing, with each principal on the rise and fall arc along with RiM itself.
A company achieving major success and then failing to innovate beyond its original idea is interesting for a Fortune cover story, but what guarantees BlackBerry’s cinematic success is how trapped its characters become. Lazaridis has simple goals; make a great product that meets a high standard. He’s thwarted at every stage, and the way that Baruchel makes these defeats and compromises into a personal blow is a reliable source of pathos. Very quickly, BlackBerry becomes a Faustian story where short-term success is achieved by guaranteeing long-term failure down the road, such that the noble goal was always impossible. Balsillie is necessary to fend off takeovers and cons that Lazaridis and Fregin were walking into, but his ill-suited nature to a tech company means that he’ll get distracted and be somewhere else when it counts. The capitalist god of the movie is watching overhead, throwing thunderbolts when it’s time for him to collect.
As classically star-crossed as the story comes off, this is also a frequently hilarious movie. Howerton’s eruptions and flabbergasted expressions do a lot of the work here, but so does Fregin’s strange combination of nerd and bro. The film’s events trend toward the absurd, and Johnson’s tone rises, or sinks, to meet them. However, it’s Baruchel who is the big revelation, sympathetic as a man who can only express himself through his engineering. Watching him take in a situation that he deems insufficient, consider what to do about it, and then mentally recognize that he is not capable of turning it around is tough every time, but Baruchel keeps the character from being pathetic. There’s something in his portrayal that prevents Lazaridis from being a figure of fun, and it elevates BlackBerry from a satire into a tragedy. To the extent that Air and Flamin Hot have anything to do with this film other than a similar release date, BlackBerry’s the only one that leaves the viewer with anything approaching genuine feelings towards the central company. There’s something amazing about a tech company that does local manufacturing in a midsize Canadian city beating up on the Silicon Valley big boys. A charmless, white-haired dork who can’t speak up for himself seduced me. This film works. A-
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