Saul Rubinek – Movie Musings

Comic-drama about business collapse wants to The Social Network but lacks its deft touch and humanity

Director: Matt Johnson

Cast: Jay Baruchel (Mike Lazaridis), Glenn Howerton (Jim Balsillie), Matt Johnson (Doug Fregin), Rich Sommer (Paul Stannos), Michael Ironside (Charles Purdy), Martin Donovan (Rick Brock), Michelle Giroux (Dara Frankel), Saul Rubinek (John Woodman), Cary Elwes (Carl Yankowski)

“We’ll be the phone people had before they had an iPhone!” I’ve always found successful products that collapsed overnight fascinating. The Blackberry tapped into something people didn’t even realise they wanted: a phone that combines a computer and pager, a status symbol that told everyone you were a Master of the Universe. It was the product everyone wanted – until Steve Jobs announced the iPhone that did everything the Blackberry did better. It should be material for an entertaining film – but Blackberry isn’t quite it.

The film is set up as a classic Faust story. Our Faust is Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), co-founder and CEO of Research in Motion, a tiny Canadian business with an idea for lovingly crafted cellular devices. Our Mephistopheles is Jim Balsille (Glenn Howerton), an aggressive blowhard businessman who sees the potential – and knows he can sell it the way the timid Lazaridis never could. The angel on Faust’s shoulder is co-founder Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson), who worries the quality-and-fun parts of the business will be sacrificed. Nevertheless, Mephistopheles tempts Faust into partnership and they turn Blackberry into a huge business destined to all fall apart.

Blackberry desperately wants to be The Social Network. What it lacks is both that film’s wit and sense of humanity. It’s a film trying too hard all the time, always straining to be edgy. You can see it in its hand-held, deliberately soft-focus filming style, the camera constantly shifting in and out of blur. (Watching after a while I genuinely started to feel uncomfortable, with a wave of motion sickness nausea.) It goes at everything at one hundred miles an hour, but never manages to make its depiction of a company bought low by arrogance and unwillingness to adapt either funny or moving. It’s aiming to capture the chaos, but instead feels slightly like a student film.

It’s Faustian theme of selling out your principles for glory is just too familiar a story – and the dialogue isn’t funny enough to make the film move with the zingy outrageousness it’s aiming for. It also lacks momentum, the woozy hand-held camerawork actually slowing things down, a very shot lurches into focus. It’s a film crying out for speedy montage and jump-cuts to turn it into a sort of cinematic farce, as the business makes ever more sudden, chancy calls which switch at the mid-point from paying off to unravelling. Instead, it stumbles around like a drunken sailor.

At the centre, Jay Baruchel delivers the most complex work as the awkward and timid Lazaridis who slowly absorbs more and more smart business styling and ruthlessness over the film. But the film fumbles his corruption. His opening mantras – that “good enough is the enemy of humanity”, that Chinese mass production equals low quality because the workers aren’t paid enough to care about the product, that companies should focus on human needs – are all-too obviously dominos set up to get knocked over as Lazaridis gets corrupted and cashes out his principles to turn out exactly the sort of bug-filled mass-produced crap he railed against at the start – but this makes the character himself feel more like a human domino himself rather than living, breathing person.

The other performances all verge on cartoonish. Glenn Howerton channels Gordon Gekko and The Thick of It’s Malcolm Tucker as abusive, sweary, would-be Master-of-the-Universe, only-interested-in-the-bottom-line Jim Balsille. Balsille will do everything Lazaridis won’t do: he’ll cut corners and browbeat his way into meetings. A smarter film would make clear Balsille is in many ways more effective than Lazaridis – that without him Research in Motion would have gone bust years ago. It could also have looked with more sympathy at a guy who so believed in his one shot at glory he re-mortgaged his house to pay for it. But the film leans into Howerton’s skill at explosive outburst and never really humanises him, constantly shoving him into the role of villain.

The film also fails with its more human element. Director Matt Johnnson plays Doug Fregin, Lazaridis’ best friend and business partner. Fregin is set-up as the angel in Lazaridis shoulder, the decent guy against selling out. But Johnson’s performance lacks charm or likeability. Fregin – like many of the other workers of the company – is a geek-bro, his veins pumping with fratboy passions, who thinks the best way to get people working is to throw a string of parties. He’s, in a way, as wrong as Balsille is on what makes long-term business success. Crucially as well, the friendship between him and Lazaridis never really rings true, not least because Fregin browbeats and bullies the timid Lazaridis as much as Balsille does.

With no-one to really care for, the tragedy of this business never hits home. It does capture the sense of desperation as the once-mighty company collapses in the face of Apple – Lazaridis ramming his head into the sand and refusing to believe anyone would want a phone sans keyboard – but it fails to successfully illustrate why an innovator lost his ‘magic’ touch. The script fails to land much of its humour, and tiptoes around positioning Lazaridis as increasingly corrupted, even as starts hiring brash businessmen (epitomised by Michael Ironside’s sergeant-major fixer) to say the thing to his underlings that he’s too scared to. The financial shenanigans that land Blackberry in trouble with the SEC aren’t properly explained, and the actual reasons the iPhone finally put Blackberry in the dust bin of history are hand-waved away (“minutes… data… look just accept it ok”)

Blackberry would, in the end, have been better as an hour-long documentary, with dramatic reconstructions supported by informative talking heads. The film we have fails to deliver on a concept that bursts with comic and dramatic potential.

Clint Eastwood rediscovers the dangers of killing in classic Western Unforgiven

Director: Clint Eastwood

Cast: Clint Eastwood (William Munny), Gene Hackman (Sheriff Little Bill Daggett), Morgan Freeman (Ned Logan), Richard Harris (English Bob), Jaimz Woolvett (The Schofield Kid), Saul Rubinek (WW Beauchamp), Frances Fisher (Strawberry Alice), Anna Thomson (Delilah Fitzgerald), David Mucci (Quick Mike), Rob Campbell (Davey Bunting), Anthony James (Skinny Dubois)

The Western has a reputation for “white hats” and “black hats” – goodies and baddies, with sheriffs taking on ruthless killers with the backdrop of civilisation hewn out of the wildness of the West. It had passed out of fashion by 1992, and this memory is largely what remained. That helps describe the impact of Unforgiven. A great revisionist Western, searingly honest about the brutality of the West, it was made by an actor more associated with the Western than almost any other since Wayne, Clint Eastwood. Articulate, sensitive, intelligent and superbly made, it marked the transition of Eastwood from star to Hollywood artist. It’s still his greatest movie.

In 1880 in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, the face of prostitute Delilah (Anna Thomson) is slashed with a knife after she sniggers at a customer’s unimpressive manhood. The two cowboys responsible are ordered to compensate her pimp by sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett (Gene Hackman). Disgusted, the other prostitutes chip in for a $1000 bounty on the men responsible. A young man calling himself ‘The Schofield Kid’ (Jamiz Woolvett) seeks out famed gunslinger William Munny (Clint Eastwood) to help claim the bounty. Once a brutal killer, Munny is now a repentant widower raising two children – and desperate for money. Recruiting old friend Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), Munny rides to Big Whiskey – but will he return to his violent ways?

Unforgiven explodes the romantic mythology of the West, in a way that really made people sit up and notice. In truth, revisionist Westerns had been made for decades before 1992 – Eastwood himself had already directed at least two – but as the public hadn’t flocked to see films like McCabe and Mrs Miller (wrongly!) the main memory of the Western was of the (excellent) likes of High Noon, Shane and John Wayne (but not the Wayne of Red River). Nearly every classic Western, to be frank, has a dark heart and questions the mythology. But few films so starkly exposed the violence, ruthlessness, cruelty and empty morality of the West – or more viciously attacked the romanticism built up around it.

In Unforgiven characters – particularly Munny – are constantly haunted by their past killings. The violence described is always cheap, pointless and brutal, fuelled by huge amounts of booze. Munny never seems to remember why he even did something – be it blowing a man’s face off to killing women and children. Whenever we hear about the past, it is a parade of short-tempered, violent, pissed men using the gun as a first-and-last resort, and never thinking of the consequences. The real ‘heroes’ of the West kill without batting an eyelid and, no matter how charming they might seem, have a terrifying capacity for sadism and violence. Place Munny back into this environment, and it isn’t long before his long-hardened ease with killing emerges once again.

It’s men like this the bounty will draw to Big Whiskey – and Little Bill knows it. Little Bill is superbly played by Gene Hackman (he won every award going), full of bonhomie and charisma matched only by a ruthless “end-justifies-the-means” philosophy that sees this law-giver carry out increasingly brutal and sadistic acts to preserve order. Brutally beating gunslingers – and worse – are justified in his mind, to prevent the chaos and slaughter they bring. And he mocks the pretensions of gunslingers fancying themselves romantic heroes, but doesn’t half enjoy telling tales of his own of exploits.

It’s not a surprise that the film’s face of law-and-order is shown to be just as at ease with violence as the killers he is protecting the town from. It’s part of Unforgiven’s intriguing study of morality. When, if ever, is violence justified? Do the ends justify the means, or is killing never acceptable? Or is it fine if you are convinced the cause is right or the target deserving? How long before you’ve slid so far down this slippery slope, that questions of right-and-wrong don’t even enter your head before you pick up a gun?

There couldn’t be a better face for this than Eastwood. Clint looks old, ravaged and tired, just as Munny is, haunted by the screams of men he no longer even remembers. He’s soulful enough to know he has no soul, capable of understanding he needs to change, but also able to revert to dealing out murder. Eastwood deconstructs his own screen personae of “the man with no name” into an old man who can’t face his past and is filled with regrets. As the film progresses, more and more Munny rebuilds his ease with killing – eventually exacting a revenge that leaves a trail of bodies behind.

There is nothing romantic about any of this: despite the best efforts of journalist WW Beauchamp (played with wide-eyed gusto and energy by Saul Rubinek) to inject it. Beauchamp has made a living turning the adventures of gunslingers into romantic best sellers – and is the films’ clearest attack on Hollywood itself for romanticising an era of violence and mayhem. Beauchamp is the biographer of genteel killer English Bob, who has made his money “shooting Chinamen” for the railroads. Played with a self-important grandness by Richard Harris (one of his finest performances), English Bob (actually a working-class oik masquerading as a gentleman) is living his own press release as a gentleman gunslinger. The fact that – as Little Bill delightedly reveals – he is just as much an alcoholic murderer with no principles is just another example of how little reality and fiction meet.

At least Munny accepts he’s a bad man. Perhaps that’s why his late wife shocked her mother by marrying him – he has enough self-knowledge to want to change even if he can’t. But of his three companions – Morgan Freeman is brilliant as the jovial Ned who has lost his taste for killing – only he lasts the course. That’s not a good thing. When we finally see a fully reverted Munny, downing a bottle of whiskey and shooting up a saloon he’s terrifying: brutally efficient with shooting, in a way that panicked shooters can never compete with.

In Unforgiven violence comes with a cost. A shot man takes a long time to die. The women who called most for violence, are left speechless by meeting the reality of it. A man’s soul is marked forever by taking life – “It’s a hell of thing killing a man. You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s ever going to have”. It’s a responsibility only a fool takes on lightly – or sober. Munny and Little Bill are they only ones we see who have come to terms with it in some way, one as a necessary evil, the other as an evil he can switch on and off like a tap. Their ruthless coldness is hardly an advert for wanting to be part of this world.

Eastwood’s masterpiece tackles all these ideas with gusto, while telling an engrossing story powered by brilliant performances – Hackman in particular, Freeman and Eastwood are all stunning – and asks you to take a deep look at what we admire so much about violence. It does this in a subtle, autumnal way (with a haunting score), its muted colours helping to drain any further romance from the West. Gripping, thought-provoking and engrossing, Unforgiven is one of the greatest of Westerns.