BlackBerry (2023)

Rated R for language.  It's that corporate thriller kind of swearing.  I don't know if you can make a movie R because characters are mean to each other.  It does have a lot of meanness, but the R-rating comes from that inside baseball corporate swagger.  It's a lot of the same R-rating that comes from Succession.  So if you are good with swearing, you could probably handle this movie.  R.

DIRECTOR: Matt Johnson

Bear with me.  I'm going to have a lot of false starts.  I have limited amount of things that I can think of to say about Blackberry, but they're all various facets of the same idea.  A lot of this blog is going to be written from a scared place. Not horrified.  Lord knows that I've been stumped by a lot of movies. I don't think I am stumped by this movie.  I just think I lack the right voice to write about this movie. Before I get completely flummoxed in a web of nonsequiturs and rambling, just know that I absolutely loved this movie.  I sometimes forget to make my opinion clear on things.

Adam McKay started something so incredibly specific that it could now be considered a subgenre.  Just so I can do some handholding and make my point absolutely crystal, McKay was the comedic director behind the Anchorman movies.  He's done a bunch of stuff, but Anchorman really summarizes him best.  He's an incredibly talented director who is fundamentally a guy who gets the joke. McKay, a few years ago, started making a kind of movie that is so incredibly smart and serious that it can only be viewed as kind of hilarious.  The movie that I'm going to be using as my evidence is The Big Short, but that's because that's the one that a lot of people saw.  While The Big Short had jokes, it was a deadly serious movie about a real issue stemming out of late-stage capitalism.  It wanted you to laugh, but also acknowledge that this was a movie that could not be dismissed.  To do this, the majority of the movie, despite having a cast that had comedic chops, was as serious as a heart attack.  When people hear the word "satire", they automatically put it into the three kinds of comedy (farce, satire, and parody). But a satire doesn't actually need to be funny.  It is really an emotional commentary on either a person or an event.

Yes, The Big Short was funny at times.  But the reason that it permated the cultural zeitgeist was because of how seriously the movie treated the subject matter. What Matt Johnson did with Blackberry took the swing that The Big Short did and went even more meta.  The Big Short broke the fourth wall at times, reminding you that this was a movie that was both entertaining and informative, all blanketed in heavy politics.  Blackberry, on the other hand, wants you to laugh at its very existence.  The entire movie, as gorgeous and intense as it is, almost feels like an inside joke on everyone.  It is a dare, begging its audience to do what I'm doing right now.  It is a movie made by comedians starring comedians and the most obvious comedieans never tell a joke.  Sure, there are moments that are absolutely hilarious.  Matt Johnson, who plays Doug in the movie as well, gets some of these perfect comedic gems that are objectively funny.  But when you have Glenn Howerton and Jay Baruschel doing a two-hander for most of the movie and they never even wince, there's something hilariously trollish about the whole thing. 

What is super cool about this choice is that one of two things had to happen to make this movie the way it was. The joke was always going to be "No one laugh.  The joke lies in treating it as serious as can be."  The first scenario is that Matt Johnson and the entire team behind this movie were so prescient that they actually pulled it off.  The other is almost more encouraging.  While the joke about being serious was there, they actually realized that they made an incredible corporate thriller that stands on its own two feet and doesn't really need the metacontext to make the movie work.  I mean, I'm stealing from Cinefix a bit here, which is one of the reasons I'm watching the movie right now.  They commented on Glenn Howerton's Jim as one of the most intense performances of the year and he's wearing an absurd bald cap the entire movie.  But guess what?  I really stopped seeing him as the Always Sunny guy pretty darned quick, despite the fact that both of his characters are overconfident jerks.  

I mean, we know its a joke even beyond the casting.  The fact that the movie is a tell-all about BlackBerry might be a tease to the year Titanic came out.  "You know the boat sinks in the end, right?  Spoiler alert!"  We had all of these movies about Steve Jobs and his meteoric rise to success.  But the fact that there is a movie about the number two phone in history kind of says everything that it needs to in the title.  We go in with a sense of "of course it's going to fail." 

But that joke almost makes all of these moments all the more tragic.  This is a story about two desperately different human beings.  One of these guys is the nerd.  The other is the overconfident jerk.  I tend to shy away from biopics because the biopic formula has picked the entire subgenre clean. But because this movie is a bit of a satire not only on the role of capitalism on society, but also on the corporate thriller, these archetypes becomes somehow fresh again. Mike is an earnestly sympathetic character.  I don't know if this was a detail from the book that the movie was based on, but there's this really interesting little moment that the character gets.  There's this humbing neurosis that Mike has.  He hears white noise in poorly made objects.  It's this thing that is a constant reminder of the character and his need to do things well.  There's nothing funny about it.  As much as Matt Johnson as Doug is wearing a headband and pulling out Ninja Turtles wallets, Mike is there, fixing the lazy mistakes that a Chinese factory put into an American product.  That's how the movie starts.  That's how the movie ends.  

See, if I was to completely dismiss this movie as simply a meta joke, I couldn't say that was fair.  Those moments of Mike taking apart technology is amazing character development.  This is a 3D character existing when he's supposed to be a famous actor in a wig.  This isn't the only moment. This is a movie that escapes the trappings that it hoists on itself.  Jim, a dirtbag through and through in this movie, has these moments of true disappointment.  His little petty emotional war with the CEO of Palm Pilot is so revealing about the values of this characters.  He's a guy who has burned every bridge he's ever crossed and it becomes not if he can redeem himself, but more a matter of how much can this man sink.  

The movie even brought out the worst in me.  Listen, I'm ready to throw Capitalism in the trash.  I'm in that camp now.  It's the worst and these movies remind me about how gross things get out there in the corporate world.  That being said, like Glengarry, Glen Ross, the very thing that the screenwriters are warning me about are the things that I find just a little sexy when presented this way.  I would hate every moment of being on the ground floor of BlackBerry. There's this running gag that the engineers only like Movie Nights.  (Note: Doug promised them the Letterboxed VHS of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Last time I checked, that was pan-and-scan.  Just don't say it if you can't show the letterboxed version.)  When Michael Ironside's Charles Purdy comes in with a foreboding warning from another engineer, it's sad when the team has to be bummed to work on these phones silently and intensely.  But I was also thinking that there was no way that these phones were going to be successful without people like Charles Purdy.  Heck, I was getting darned frustrated with them because of their lackadaisical whimsy. They knew that Mike wasn't going to yell at them so they didn't try hard.

Do you know what button was hit really hard with this movie?  I miss Halt and Catch Fire.  This was the same show.  If I remember correctly, there might have even been a Canadian connection as well.  But it is fundamentally the same story.  These were characters who were motivated to change the world through technology and were ultimately doomed to be second place in the grand scheme of things.  But I like that story.  I like it a lot.  Man, I wish I hadn't thought of that Halt and Catch Fire thing right now because it makes BlackBerry just a little less original as a concept.  But I also know that Halt and Catch Fire took multiple seasons to get across what BlackBerry does in a fairly short stretch.

This movie has somehow aggressively entered my orbit this week.  Everyone I know is talking about it.  Cinefix talked about it.  I keep seeing ads for it.  Then the library had it on Lucky Day?  I mean, it was bound to be seen.  I'm also really glad that I'm writing about this before I write about The Blackening, which is probably going to be a tomorrow thing.  But right now, I'm pretty happy with this one.