Much of the new movie “BlackBerry,” which kicks off in 1996, looks like an episode of “The Office.”
If you enjoyed Ben Affleck’s “Air,” currently in theatres, but felt that it was too puffed up, here comes a lesson in deflation. Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” is a reminder that, in dramatic terms, rise and fall is almost always more gripping, and more morally provoking, than rise and rise. For those who were off-planet, or awaiting conception, at the dawn of the millennium, the title may need some explanation.
Much of the action, kicking off in 1996, takes place in the company offices; most of it, indeed, looks like an episode of “The Office.” The camera appears to be caffeinated, refusing to settle, darting from one worried face to the next. That restlessness, though tiring to behold, works because it mimics the inquisitive energy of the characters. Near the start, while Mike is nerving himself to present a pitch, he gets so annoyed by the buzzy hiss of an intercom that he can’t help taking it apart.
What causes the fissure is, needless to say, success. Johnson is not so insolent as to sneer at commercial ambition, but unlike Affleck he doesn’t burnish his movie into a hymn of praise. What appeals to him, I think, is the way in which striving toward triumph means, in practice, stumbling along with a mixture of haplessness and gall.
The first place that we see in Manuela Martelli’s new movie, “Chile ’76,” is Venice—a sleight of hand, since the whole film is set in Chile. A woman named Carmen , middle-aged and elegantly dressed, leafs through images of Venice in a book, picks out a peachy sunset, and asks a man in a hardware store to match the color. We watch the paint being stirred in a metal bucket, and then drops of it falling onto her shoe. Such is Martelli’s method, brisk and oblique, for steering us into the story.
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