Movie Review - Social Network

Sometimes films come along that have the ability to define a generation. These movies may not necessarily be the best of their era – although they’re usually up there - but rather they capture the zeitgeist of a particular historical moment — think of The Graduate, Saturday Night Fever, or Wall Street. The Social Network is the film for the Facebook generation, and it’s not just because it’s a movie about Facebook. Writer Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing) and director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) have created a film that typifies the paradoxical age we live in — one where we are always connected, yet in increasingly impersonal ways.

The film centers on the controversial origin of the most important social innovation of this century: Facebook. It begins in a Boston bar in 2004, where eventual Facebook-founder, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), is stressing to his girlfriend about being accepted by one of Harvard’s prestigious “final clubs.” The discussion takes a turn for the worst and Zuckerberg is swiftly dumped. We are to believe that this dumping provides the emotional motivation for Zuckerberg to eventually build his empire — its Michael Corleone being punched in the jaw, Darth Vader being told to rise, the creation of a monster. It’s unlikely that this dumping actually happened, but it is one of many necessary liberties Sorkin takes to build what turns out to be a compelling narrative.

In response to the break up, computer geek Zuckerberg heads back to his dorm room to write a diatribe on his blog and ends up creating a website for Harvard students to rank the attractiveness of their classmates, calling it Facemash. This episode gets Zukerberg in some hot water with the administration, but it does catch the attention of fellow Harvard students, the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer), who ask Zuckerberg to help them with their idea of a social networking site for the Harvard community. Zuckerberg decides to circumvent them and build a better site of his own: “The Facebook.”

Sorkin, who adapted the screenplay from Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, opts for a non-linear route. He tells the story from multiple perspectives (he said Rashomon inspired his writing for the film) and jumps between the story of Facebook’s origin and the subsequent legal battles between Zuckerberg, the Winklevosses, and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) — Zuckerberg’s college friend and Facebook’s co-founder. The result is the most riveting film about Internet coding and intellectual property law ever made.

Zuckerberg is at the center of it all, and Eisenberg plays the conflicted genius with the calculating detachment the role requires. More than a few critics have noted similarities between Eisenberg’s version of the Facebook founder and one Charles Foster Kane. Expect Eisenberg to get an Oscar nomination come January, and don’t be surprised to see at least one of his co-stars join him — specifically Andrew Garfield, who plays Saverin with a real depth of emotion and energy. Garfield’s work in the film’s climatic scene (which involves some destroyed technology) alone should be enough to garner him a Supporting Actor nod. The rest of the cast holds up fairly well, too. Justin Timberlake is a great combination of sleaze, suave, and paranoia as Napster co-founder and former Facebook president, Sean Parker, while Hammer is the epitome of Harvard crew team elitism as the Winklevoss twins.

Furthermore, Fincher is at the top of his directorial game. He extracts great performances from his actors and manages to take a film about computer geeks and give it the weight of gangster drama. And the Winklevoss twins’ rowing sequence is a thing of filmmaking beauty.

But it’s the writing that makes The Social Network a film for the ages. Sorkin’s dialogue is masterful. He fills every scene with tension and drama. He fills every character, Zuckerberg especially, with the moral ambiguity that characterizes our generation. Sorkin makes the audience feel as if they are witnessing the creation of something epically grand but intensely intimate at the same time. And isn’t that exactly what Facebook is — our most personal and intimate details at the fingertips of the entire universe? The Social Network takes this strange contradiction and throws it back at us — in that way, it really is a film for our time.

Noteworthy News: Look, or rather, listen for Jesse Eisenberg as the voice of Blu, a domesticated macaw from small-town Minnesota who ends up in Rio De Janeiro in the Twentieth Century Fox animated film Rio coming out in 2011.

Andrew Garfield will don the red and blue webbed-suit as the title character in the Spider-Man reboot expected in 2012.

David Fincher has begun directing the American adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which will star Social Network actress Rooney Mara.