Film Review | The Social Network

Lo and behold, our generation finally has a defining story up on the silver screen.

The elements making up The Social Network – the eagerly awaited feature on the early days of Facebook – are such a perfect brew, it’s almost Machiavellian. Director David Fincher arguably made the most representative ‘Y2K’ film with Fight Club, a pitch-black but pitch-perfect expression of capitalist angst and troubled masculinity coming at the tail end of  the 20th century.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, a playwright who broke into Hollywood with A Few Good Men (“You can’t handle the truth!”), re-created its mix of rapid-fire, caustically funny dialogue and political intrigue in the television series The West Wing, which offered viewers a look into the inner workings of the Oval Office and hit on some pertinent pressure points during the Bush administration.

In The Social Network, the subject appears to be more low-key – college-kid computer geniuses and budding businessmen scrambling to pocket as much as they can out of the internet Gold Rush – but this is a look at recent history that is at once more intimate (we’re all on Facebook) and more far-reaching (the web has changed us forever and is here to stay) than any dramatisation of the Washington higher-ups could ever be.

At its heart, however, is the sheer frailty of human integrity in the face of rapid technological change and seemingly unlimited opportunity.

Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) masterminds a very unique type of revenge on the female of the species after his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara) dumps him. In one night, he programmes and sets up FaceMash, a site that would allow his fellow Harvard students to compare and rate female students.

The site gets thousands of hits in one night, crashing Harvard’s servers in the process and resulting in Mark’s six-month academic probation. But the young programmer’s efforts impress Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss (both played by Armie Hammer), Harvard rowers who, along with their business partner Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) want to create a Harvard-exclusive social networking website.

Enlisting Mark to help out, they rapidly discover that his interests lie elsewhere and when, along with business major Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), he sets up ‘The Facebook’, based on a concept that ‘the Winkelvii’ believe he stole from then.
Meanwhile, Mark and Eduardo’s relationship becomes more and more strained as Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) joins the team – seducing Mark with his louche attitude but alienating Eduardo because of it.

Two court cases against Mark frame the film: in the first layer there’s the Winkelvoss plagiarism lawsuit… then there’s the more emotionally pertinent struggle between Eduardo and Mark. A fact that ensures, from the word go, that what will follow is a lot of talk.

However, Sorkin’s experience as both a playwright, and in particular a writer highly comfortable with the pettiness of individuals struggling under and scrambling for the structures of power, ensures that we are not bored for a second (I for one barely felt the two-hour-plus running time go by). But it’s not just a skilful hand at dialogue that is at play here. Sorkin’s Zuckerberg – culled from the pages of Brad Mezrich’s 2009 hatchet-job The Accidental Billionares – is an unnerving blank slate: you don’t know what his genius will dictate next or just how far he will go to advance his mission… though his background, emotional landscape and ultimate motive remain entirely elusive.

Eisenberg’s performance matches the blank-faced intensity of the character. He’s been an actor to watch for a while: playing his endearing awkwardness for laughs in two ‘‘lands’ – Zombie and Adventure – and nailing the emotionally short-circuited teenager Walt Berkman in The Squid and the Whale. Here he reaches some sort of apotheosis. His Zuckerberg is both canny and clueless: his aim is to connect as many people as possible, but he lacks any real social graces to speak of, and is not below betrayal (one of the main strands of the story). This potent paradox is what gives the film a dark, rolling energy that is, ultimately, the stuff of the finest satire.

None of this would have been at all special were it not rendered to perfection by Fincher. He is a master of the brutal, claustrophobic scenario – from the botched Alien 3 to Se7en and Zodiac – his strong visual imprint (learnt from years as a music video director) has lent an edgy imprint on many a thriller. Here, he brings to mind the office-bound scenes of Fight Club and not much else… and it is particularly remarkable that not only is his stamp felt, but that the limited palette is made to resonate nonetheless. One yearns for more Fincher-Sorkin collaborations in the future.