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BlackBerry, and the Inevitable Pitfalls of Consumer Innovation


I’m pretty sure my second ever cell phone was a BlackBerry. I was a late adopter of cell phones for my generation -this was about 2009, well after both the launch of the iPhone had signaled the end of the keyboard-style smartphone and BlackBerry itself had been embroiled in a pretty major financial scandal. Being a hip college student, I traded it in for a Nokia in 2012, by which point BlackBerry was pretty firmly dead as a cell phone company, myself oblivious to just how big it had been in the decade prior.
The rise and fall of this, Canada’s only notable globally viable tech company, is told in the movie BlackBerry, a sardonic take on how a little Waterloo-based manufacturing startup called Research In Motion briefly revolutionized the international cell phone market before being brought down by what the movie seems to argue was an inevitable mix of terminal managerial dysfunction and a certain ineptitude in market competitiveness. It’s directed by Matt Johnson, from a screenplay he wrote with Matthew Miller based on the book Losing the Signal, which chronicled the inner workings of RIM from the mid-90s to it’s crash. It’s a movie comfortable in that vein of business cautionary tales like The Wolf of Wall Street and tech development dramas like The Social Network alike; but it’s not slick like those films -instead relying on a distinct wry sensibility to it’s chaos, as it depicts the rise in power and influence of a team of people who fundamentally don’t know what they are doing.
Oh, they’re intelligent for sure, and more than technologically competent. The engineers at RIM can certainly pull off impressive feats of innovation, even under a crunch; but they are also a bunch of Canadian tech nerds who spend a lot of time on message boards, schedule regular movie nights, and are not prepared for the consequences of after their product is made and sells. And there are no greater victims of the company’s success than the guys in charge. One thing the movie makes pretty clear from the start is how both eventual co-CEOs, awkward conceptualist Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and tyrannical venture capitalist Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) have no experience as to the risks they’re taking in running a tech company and are woefully ill-equipped to sustain it once it explodes and becomes competitive. Before joining forces they are both losers in their respective areas, Balsillie disrespected by his superiors and fired from a previous job, Lazaridis completely ineffectual as a company leader (often folding next to his best friend and co-founder Doug Fregin, played by Johnson himself) and a sap to powerful buyers flagrantly reneging on their contract. These guys are underdogs, and the movie a real underdog tale of failure.
In spite of poor wigs and bald caps, and a startling inconsistency in the pace of aging between characters across a span of twelve years (Lazaridis’ hair gets progressively whiter while Balsillie and Fregin remain exactly the same down to Fregin’s casual crop top and 80s headband), there is some solid acting in this movie, especially from Howerton, who is admittedly in his comfort zone as a raging lunatic, but plays it strongly with sharply-tuned directness. A hot-headed bullshitter, Balsillie is this movie’s image of the corporate tycoon, somewhat the villain of the piece, who embodies that arrogance, corruption, and the excess seen in other movies of this flavour, though in this case taking the form less in sex, drugs, and yachts as in an obsession with buying an NHL hockey franchise. Baruchel stretches himself a bit too, although less successfully -Lazaridis’ eventual corruption to the system and transformation merely looking like Cousin Greg from Succession trying to be Steve Jobs.
Of course the shadow of Jobs plays a big part, from his brief appearances in a montage over the opening credits depicting the 90s tech boom, and culminating in the third act, which is highly concerned with the efforts by BlackBerry to respond to the cataclysmic shake-up in their industry that is the iPhone. And Johnson does a fine job capturing the futility of this, especially in pursuit of a retained aesthetic. The movie sympathizes a lot with Lazaridis and his attachment to what was at one time such a golden concept. There is a palpable love for this weird little cellular device all through the movie, associating it with the free-spirited geeky nature of its engineers. But those same engineers are not very adaptable, which is also a crucial aspect of the BlackBerry.
We don’t really get the details of the device’s evolution, though the movie spans the dial-up internet age to the dominion of the app market -another subtle way it defines the BlackBerry as a bridge. But its relationship to the demands of high-stakes capital is plainly articulated, specifically how the technology lags behind the needs of profitability -or Balsillie’s in any case. A great example of this is his attempt to sell a lot more BlackBerrys, specifically to wealthy CEOs and politicians (in fact the movie undersells the elite reputation BlackBerry had for this), than it’s bandwidth can withstand -if your and everyone else’s BlackBerry ever went offline, this is the movie’s explanation. Rather than rein in and hold back, the only option Balsillie sees is scooping up the smartest engineers from Google and Apple for salaries he can’t afford. It’s not enough that the company can just be successful, which is why Johnson conveys that success  only through a montage time-jump -because the point is, it always needs to be more, driven by economics to be better than whatever else is on the market.
Johnson has the movie shot in a mockumentary style, reminiscent of the trend in modern sitcoms; and it’s a clever, distinctive choice that communicates the scrappy sense of this endeavour and accentuates the movie’s overall sardonic tone. It’s quite consciously a funny film, aware that it’s subject is not some major power in the tech industry and is mostly regarded as a nifty, bemusing footnote on the journey to the smartphone revolution. There’s a pervasive irony to every story beat that Johnson and his cast have some fun exploiting, particularly around Balsillie’s attempts to both close an NHL deal in New York and negotiate with AT&T’S CEO in Atlanta on the same day. But there are also great little jokes that revel in Balsillie’s humourless personality or Lazaridis’ out-of-his-depth power -and one excellent shot that pokes fun at the cultural invisibility of women within this particular industry. And perhaps an unintentional bit of comedy comes from the movie expecting Canadian audiences to believe that Mark Critch in his heavy Newfoundland accent is the Canada-dismissing head of the NHL.
BlackBerry by quite literally depicting the rise and fall of it’s titular product and only those, is ultimately a classic story of innovation being crushed by commerce, the perversion of brilliant ideas to the needs of the capitalist machine -positioning Lazaridis as the avatar of the former, Balsillie of the latter. It’s quite successful in this messaging, if the movie itself could have been a bit more expansive or multi-faceted -the characters don’t have any interior lives, and much as it may fly in the face of certain clichés, it keeps the one where the name of the thing comes from somewhere superfluous. It’s entertaining though, and interesting -the Canadian character of it’s approach as well as its setting gives it a refreshing charm. And the particularly savage tragicomic beat of it’s ending hits in a way no other movie this year has.

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