The Social Network (2010)

Directed by: David Fincher
Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Justin Timberlake...

Background and insight:

I’ve been a fan of Aaron Sorkin since the birth of the West Wing. I can remember watching the pilot and turning to my wife and saying I thought Martin Sheen was in this show. In a brave but incredibly effective move, Sheen only arrived near the end of the episode. When he entered as President Bartlet and uttered the words “I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt worship no other God before me. Boy, those were the days, huh?”... I was hooked. So I was very interested to learn that Sorkin was penning a script to be directed by the excellent David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room). But was left a little big underwhelmed by the subject matter. It was being pitched as a movie about facebook. Although the tagline was genius and prompted that the story would be more layered that first anticipated: “You don’t get 500 million friends without making a few enemies”.

Now most of us use it or have at least heard about it. How can one not have when apparently a third of internet users are on or are using facebook. With some 500 million users it is hard to avoid knowledge of it on some level. But the first question that popped into my head, was how could you make a film about it?

Well the film is not concerned with the site, well calling it a website is a little naive. It is a social network, a construct of custom applications. But for the most people it is the internet. Or the internet within the internet. The movie is mostly concerned with its conception by its founder (Mark Zuckerberg) and the court cases that spurned by its meteoric rise to success (and dollar value).

Characters and Cast:

The casting “ace in the hole” is very much the presence of Jesse Eisenberg as the film hinges on his performance and he plays the “boy billionaire genius” perfectly. There is a certain amount of irony (I think) that the inventor of THE social network (Facebook) could himself appear to be socially stunted. Zuckerberg appears to be a person that feels he is superior to everyone else (and intellectually he may well be) but he appears to go out of his way to remind people of this as well as turn on everyone around him. We first witness this during the film’s opening with some classic styled Sorkin dialogue, where Zukerberg (Eisenberg) goes out of his way to talk down to his girlfriend and starts to panic and retract what he has said, but all a little too late (I found myself thinking what a prick). He cleverly paints us a character picture of the movie to come (which is when I knew I was about to watch some special and unique, after all the writer and director just alienated it’s leading man with their audience in the opening minutes) an we are later reminded with the excellent piece of dialogue “You're not an asshole Mark. You're just trying so hard to be one” (more of this in the section concerning story and plot). Zukerberg works very hard at being something he is not much to the pain of those around him.

Andrew Garfield is also very commendable as Eduardo Saverin, Zukerberg’s friend who helps finance “The Facebook” but later finds himself turned on by his friend and takes out one of the two courts cases that the film is concerned with. His performance here suggests that his selection for the new Spiderman franchise reboot was a wise choice.

Justin Timerlake plays Sean Parker the man behind Napster (again could be me, but couldn’t ignore the irony of casting one of the world biggest pop stars as the man who has been accused of bring down the music industry). It’s a fine performance by Timberlake as the charismatic walker, who lives the life of a movie/pop star which is while he appears to be a bit of a idol to Zukerberg, as Walker is the cool geek, the type of person Zukerberg is trying to be.

Another very worthy mention is Armie Hammer who plays both parts of Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss - the Harvard Twins (I didn’t realise this until I read about the fact afterwards). So two fine performances and the use of movie making magic meant I didn’t even notice this fact. The twins who have everything, are athletic, good lucking and rich so by their minds, surely should be intelligent too.

Final mention must go to the Soundtrack which is so prominent in the movie and works so well in fact, it plays like an extra character, enhancing every scene and having a life of its own. I read somewhere that Fincher wanted to create a quirky John Hughes movie and the soundtrack helps a lot in achieving that and in my book, you can’t get much better pedigree then that.

Story and Plot

I really liked how the timeline shifted back and forth to help sustain interest as we pieced together the pieces of the plot. How much if the story is based on fact or fiction could well be debated (and I’m sure has been), but in the medium of cinema one element is more important that the accuracy of the true story and that is entertainment value. From that end, The Social Network wins over its audience. It could have been a mundane story where privileged kids made even more money from the internet boom, but instead it focuses on friendship, loyalties and double crossing. We are left unsure of Zukerberg’s motives in why he chose to work without his colleagues and what his real intensions and motivations are. But considering Zukerberg is a real person and this is based on real events, perhaps that is the point. The conclusion of this story hasn’t happened yet as we have yet to see what happens with Zukerberg.

One could argue that Zukerberg simply took a good idea and made it better but he did seem to delay his colleagues with fake promises and excuses long enough to get his site live and then eventually turns on his friend that without his money at least, he would never have got started in the first place. From that end the boy genius worked with someone else’s money and ideas and became a billionaire.

Also worth mentioning is that is one of the few films that actually gets the tech right (for a change). No video game/over visual style interfaces attempting to make coding look cooler than it is. This is demonstrated when Zukerberg carries out some drunken hacking as well as nasty blogging (clearly demonstrating how we live too much of our lives online and how dangerous and hurtful it can be, if hurtful words can never be taken back, what about using the internet to do the same?) we are treated to an excellent Eisenberg voiceover when Zukerberg hacks several college intranet sites and by mistake stumbles into the brain child of facebook (but still missing key elements later seeded through the Winklevoss idea to build an exclusive website).

Final thoughts:

The wonder of the Social Network is that they managed to tell an interesting story and make an entertaining film whose central character is less than likeable. In parts Zukerberg reminded me of the Matt Damon character in Good Will Hunting. He talks down to people and god help any one that comes up against his superior intellect, but in much the same of Will (Damon) he incorrectly believes his knows more about life than everyone else, when in fact he hasn’t experienced enough of it to do so. I felt myself needing Zukerberg to get a dressing down in much the same way as Robin Williams’ character did to the genius Will (Damon) in Good Will Hunting, but by the end of the film I realised it did, but it was done by no other than Zukerberg himself, as he turned on his one true friend for no good reason what so ever. Well other then he was so caught up trying to be someone and something he wasn’t, that he turned himself into a social island.

This would have easily been a disaster of a movie if not for the expert crafting of its Director and storytelling of its writer. If I am to be bold, it’s a lesson in film making that breaks the mould a little. You don’t get a protagonist that you care about or can identify with. You don’t get an antagonist to hate and want to see lose. In face you get Mark Zukerber, the world’s youngest billionaire who in fact is a little bit of both. Should be an interesting movie for film students to study as in its heart, The Social Network is in fact a character study. This is not just a study of Zukerberg as a character but a study of each and every one of us who live in these current times. A logged in generation who are moving more towards living life virtually rather than actually. With the current and future generations of smart phone, people may live more online in the worlds of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and the obvious next generation of killer-Apps that will so obviously super seed the ones before them. Where we have friends that we don’t know or need and if we don’t like them or get along with them anymore, the delete button is but a click away.

You may find yourself thinking that the Social Network may not be the type of film you will enjoy, take a chance, you may be surprised. In today’s saturated world of comic book adaptations, The Social Network should be applauded for taking a risk and showing us something different and not predictable. You may know the story, but you will enjoy the experience. I was also interested to learn that the Social Network was a Trigger street production (Kevin Spacey, Dana Brunetti et al), looks like Triggerstreet is now a major motion picture production company.
As ever no score from me, as I no longer believing in rating a film that took someone a couple of years to conceived and complete. Giving a score out of five just seems too limited and we all skip through the review to the final rating and miss the meat and potatoes of the actual review.

So to summarise in just a few words: it had me on Sorkin...

Sean Ryan

15th November 2010

seansshack@gmail.com