Office life — that dismal existence parceled out in claustrophobic work cubes where desperate employees struggle to one-up each other and demonstrate their mettle to casually cruel bosses who often couldn't care less — can be soul-crushing, as many know. And so, lives lived in the fluorescent glare of company offices have provided dramatic fodder for several searingly memorable movies — the 1992 "Glengarry Glen Ross," scripted by David Mamet and set in the dog-eat-dog real estate business; and the 1994 "Swimming with Sharks," which focuses on the movie industry itself.
These are powerful films (and easily found online, btw). Now they're joined by BlackBerry, which tells the story of the development of the BlackBerry, the once-iconic mobile phone in the days before the unstoppable rise of Apple's upstart iPhone.
If this doesn't sound like promising ground for an action movie, well, it wasn't. And the action in this picture is largely in the tangy dialogue (director Matt Johnson scripted with Matthew Miller, from a book by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silicoff) and in the darting, doc-like cinematography by Jared Raab.
The lead characters are Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (also director Johnson), the two brainiacs behind Research In Motion (RIM), the small Canadian company that would eventually create the BlackBerry. These two draw the attention of an abrasive communications exec named Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton, of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia"), who feels they might be on the verge of creating the Holy Grail of nascent cellphone technology: a phone that can also send and receive email (and, as the hard-charging Balsillie unnecessarily observes, "can be held in your fist").
Taking charge of RIM, where the hippie-dip staff was accustomed to playing video games at their desks (hogging precious dial-up connections) and kicking back for a weekly movie night, Balsillie brings in an enforcer named Purdy (indie-cinema veteran Michael Ironside), who puts an end to all non-work distractions.
In pursuit of the elusive email-phone, RIM was up against giants in the field: Bell Atlantic (later Verizon), Google and Palm Pilot, owned by U.S. Robotics (USR). Lazaridis and Fregin had already done an ill-advised manufacturing deal with USR before Balsillie joined the company, and — being weak-willed pushovers — they were being robbed. Balsillie quickly put an end to that (and Howerton, with his fierce, hyper-type-A aggression, has us cheering the man on).
Blackberry obviously succeeded in its email-phone mission, but fortune doesn't smile on anyone forever. First, Lazaridis and Fregin witness Apple boss Steve Jobs demonstrating the first iPhone. The audience response is sensational, but Lazaridis — still committed to the button-fronted BlackBerry — is unimpressed: "Why would anybody want a phone without a keyboard?" he asks disdainfully. Then, as the iPhone takes over the nascent cell-phone market, the close friendship between Lazaridis and Fregin begins to fray. (In this, their story echoes the falling-out between Jobs and his discarded partner Steve Wozniak in Danny Boyle's 2015 biopic "Steve Jobs.")
The movie is shot in such an intimate way that we feel we're right there in the offices and conference rooms with these characters. And because of the film's ambiguous ending, we wonder if they ever had even minor reservations about the wrong turns and betrayals in which they had felt compelled to take part.
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.
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