The ups and downs of BlackBerry
Daniel Ross Goodman
Product placement is nothing new in movies, but movies about those products themselves are a new trend. BlackBerry, Canadian director Matt Johnson’s new movie about the short-lived cellphone that had a long-lasting impact, is the latest entry into this strange new genre. And while it is not as rousing or crowd-pleasing as Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Air (the famous film duo’s new movie about the Air Jordan Nike sneaker), it is riveting in its own way.
Before Apple and Steve Jobs came along, BlackBerry was the first to win the mid-to-late ’90s race between multiple tech companies to create a gadget that would essentially marry the telephone with the email-capable computer. The product was far from sleek, but by the standards of its day, it was sophisticated. And more important, it was so user-friendly that parents didn’t need their children to teach them how to use it. At its height, BlackBerry controlled over 50% of the U.S. cellphone market and 20% of the global market. Today, it controls a whopping 0% of the cellphone market.
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How did this little company from Waterloo, Ontario, rise so meteorically, and what caused its even more spectacular fall? BlackBerry tells that story.
As a workplace comedy, the film is effective at creating a genuine sense of time and place. Visual and audio references to Game Boys, screen-savers, dial-up internet signals, and popular computer games of the era, such as Doom and the excellent Civilization II, allow us to become immersed in the movie’s pre-smartphone mid-’90s world. And as a boardroom drama, it manages to convey the high-stakes technological and financial arms race that was the turn-of-the-millennium cellphone industry. Mostly, though, BlackBerry is a human story about the Icarean hubris that can drive people to fly so high that when they fall, their landing creates a smoking crater.
It begins along the pattern of other underdog stories. We meet a close-knit group of engineer-entrepreneurs working out of a ramshackle office for a small enterprise called Research In Motion, a fledgling Canadian company that is struggling to sell their products to skeptical companies. Although they are barely managing to stay afloat economically, psychologically, they are buoyant. They love what they do, and they love being around one another even more. Like the computer nerds in the classic Simpsons episode “Homer Goes to College,” the tech savants at RIM do not appear to have lives outside of the virtual ones they have mastered in the early-internet era, in which they can argue with other nerds around the world about Star Trek, play computer games, build their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles memorabilia collections, and — what’s that? Did you say “work”? They’ll get around to it at some point.
This fun-loving but going-nowhere-fast company starts to gain more direction only when the business-savvy Jim Balsillie (a scenery-chewing Glenn Howerton) enters the fray. RIM’s co-founders Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (played by director Matt Johnson) meet him after they have failed to pitch their original version of the BlackBerry (the “PocketLink”) to his telecom company. Balsillie stuns them by offering to come work for RIM — but only if they give him a share in RIM’s profits and make him co-CEO. As in Netflix’s 2022 series The Playlist, about the rise of Spotify, it is only the marriage between technological engineering and business know-how that allows the firm to thrive. It’s still a looming question, however, whether or not it was truly the right decision for Lazaridis and Fregin to have brought in Balsillie, a question only resolved at the ending and in a rush.
BlackBerry gives us little to no sense of its central characters’ lives, motivations, and backgrounds, and it feels lacking in texturizing elements that would allow us to view them as more than moving parts in a small (and then large) corporate machine. And as for the rather important supporting players whom Balsillie brings in from Google and elsewhere to develop the first prototype of the BlackBerry? You can forget about getting even the remotest insight into who they were and why they were so important in RIM’s transformation into BlackBerry.
It’s possible the story behind BlackBerry was more naturally suited to a different format, if the other entries in its genre are anything to go by. BlackBerry’s makers faced a more difficult challenge than did Damon and Affleck in Air — how to make an audience invest their time and emotion into a product-based story that lacks the charisma of a world-famous celebrity like Michael Jordan? Air’s ingredients allowed it to become a feel-good (and, I predict) eminently rewatchable dramatic film. The Playlist allowed the narratives and characters to develop at a more unhurried pace. 2020’s Console Wars, about the rise (and less spectacular fall) of Sega, the video game maker that challenged and even briefly overtook Nintendo in market share in the early ’90s, was a documentary. Each of these feels like a better fit of pacing and subject matter.
BlackBerry’s writers (Johnson, Jacquie McNish, and Matthew Miller) also miss opportunities to illustrate how world-changing the BlackBerry in fact was — how the first smartphone irrevocably altered the way we communicate and interact with one another and even how we experience life itself, filtering it through the device in our hands as much as through the brain in our heads. BlackBerry gestures at this briefly, mentioning how the BlackBerry was starting to become known as the “CrackBerry” because of how addictive it was becoming, and noting how some workplaces were even banning it because people were paying more attention to their phones during meetings than to their colleagues. But the drama is mainly contained in the RIM office, not the world it changed. I was also not thrilled with its jittery camerawork, a filmmaking gimmick that screams, “Look at me! I’m the director!” nor its overuse of close-ups, which in tandem create a needlessly disorienting viewing experience.
Still, BlackBerry succeeds more often than it fails. The film shows gamely how the seeds of BlackBerry’s failure were planted from the beginning, and it developed this theme without zooming in on it too much. Yes, BlackBerry, a movie set in a place called Waterloo, plays in part as a morality tale about the dangers of developing Napoleonic complexes. And it also offers other valuable messages — about the importance of good craftsmanship, the necessity of balancing hard work with occasional fun, and the reminder not to sell out your friends, or your soul, on your way to the top.
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Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and an incoming postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His next book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, will be published in July by the University of Alabama Press.