Cinema Verdict Review: The Social Network

The Social Network

OPENING: 10/01/2010

STUDIO: Columbia Pictures

RUN TIME: 121 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.

Opening Statement
I have to admit, I was skeptical when I first heard that David Fincher was making a movie about Facebook. Sure, David Fincher is one of my favorite living directors (I regard his Zodiac as one of the best films of the past decade), but a Facebook movie? The idea seemed like such a blatant attempt at being “trendy”; perhaps this year’s equivalent of something like The Net. However, once critics actually saw the film they proclaimed it one of the best of the year. Does The Social Network live up to the hype? In a word: Yes.

Facts of the Case
The film offers a partially fictionalized look at Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland). We first encounter Mark as a student at Harvard University, where he’s on a date with his girlfriend (Rooney Mara, A Nightmare on Elm Street). They’re engaged in a conversation he thinks is going quite well but which she finds obnoxious. She breaks up with him then and there. Frustrated and bitter, Mark storms up to his dorm room and lashes out at her on his blog. Perhaps feeling a misguided sense of animosity towards women in general, Mark then quickly proceeds to create a program that allows the male students to examine side-by-side photos of certain female students and then vote on which of the two is better-looking. The program is such an immediate success that Harvard’s entire system crashes due to the overload. This earns Mark six months of academic probation and the attention of quite a few people on campus.

Soon after, Mark is approached by three students who are in need of his assistance. They want to create a social networking website for Harvard. Mark is intrigued by the idea and sees potential in it. He agrees to their proposal, but rather than working on the site they’ve requested he begins building his own website with the assistance of his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus). As Mark’s website (initially called “the facebook”) starts to explode in popularity, the students who gave him the idea grow increasingly angry and begin to seek ways to take legal action. Mark’s life eventually enters a furious maelstrom of lawsuits, money, and betrayal, all underscored by the meteoric success of Facebook.

The Evidence
As I was browsing the reviews of The Social Network in the days before I saw the film, I noticed comparisons to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane kept popping up. Generally, a favorable comparison is some sort of critical hyperbole indicating the film in question is one of the greatest ever made, but in this instance it’s entirely appropriate. Not because The Social Network is one of the greatest films of all time (it’s remarkably good, but anything beyond that shouldn’t be stated without a reasonable passage of time), but rather because it often plays like a modern-day remake of Welles’ great film; a character-driven tale with epic themes that finds its power in very intimate moments.

It’s somewhat astonishing to consider what the film achieves in its lightning-quick two-hour running time; there are more ideas and layers to consider than in any other film I’ve seen this year. The two men primarily responsible for its success are David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, two consummate professionals whose many successes far outweigh their failures. The Social Network finds them both at the peak of their powers. Fincher once again demonstrates his superb dramatic instincts and tightly-controlled attention to detail, while Sorkin’s customary intelligence, wit, and passion are freed from the heavy-handed sermonizing that sometimes drags down his work. The film is absurdly tight on a technical level, from Jeff Cronenworth’s elegant cinematography and Kirk Baxter/Angus Wall’s crisp editing, to an atypical but effective score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

And yet, for all the film’s technical virtues (which pretty much guarantee it will earn a boatload of Oscar nominations), The Social Network‘s resonance largely lies in the intense emotional undercurrent beneath this breathlessly paced saga. Much has been made of the fact that the film’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg is not exactly flattering, but it should also be noted the portrayal is by no means unsympathetic. Some may regard him a spiteful creep, but I found a well-intentioned, intelligent, ambitious young man whose social inhibitions and relationship problems caused him to make a couple of crucial mistakes. Plenty of good people make the sort of mistakes Zuckerberg did; it’s just that his mistakes involved a lot more money and publicity.

Jesse Eisenberg is a terrific choice for the role of Mark, depicting him as a young man whose wheels are spinning so quickly he’s almost always many pages ahead of everyone else. He’s unstoppable when he puts his mind to solving a technical issue or developing an idea, but seems awkward and uncomfortable when confronted with anything that needs a more personal response. This particularly hurts Eduardo, a fundamentally nice person who knows that Mark is his friend but needs to feel it. Andrew Garfield is an actor who impresses me more and more each time I see him; his exposed-nerve performance as Eduardo plays beautifully against Eisenberg’s deeply introverted work. Justin Timberlake is also spot-on as former Napster head honcho Sean Parker, his rock star energy perfectly suited to the film’s most colorful role.

Closing Statement
I can’t recommend The Social Network highly enough. It’s an ambitious film that succeeds on every level, from its blazing opening act to that devastatingly perfect final scene. Go see it now.

The Verdict
10/10