October 6, 2010: The Social Network
This one snuck up on me. A movie about the rise of Facebook, directed by David Fincher, and I didn’t hear about it until about 2 days before it was released. My second film of the night, a rare evening when I was watching two movies which both scored in the 90s on Rotten Tomatoes, The Social Network may have its detractors but I am definitely not one of them.
Jumping narratively back and forth between legal depositions by Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook CFO over who should own what percentage of the now-gigantic company, and scenes from their college years when the idea first came to fruition, The Social Network is able to portray the events in enough detail to keep them compelling for those familiar with the rough story, but without losing the viewers who don’t know much about how (and crucially, why) the “little social network that could” ended up becoming the 800-pound gorilla in a hyper-competitive market. For my part, I was aware of some of the events surrounding Facebook’s rise, but I didn’t know much about the legal battles or the peripheral characters. How much of the story is true is a matter of some argument – most notably the film doesn’t portray Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) in the most flattering light – but if you look more closely you can see that most people don’t come off very well here. The source material is the book The Accidental Billionaires, which had input from Facebook CFO Eduardo Saverin, so it’s useful to keep that in mind when weighing the bias.
But to worry too much about the truth of the details of the story would be a disservice to this crackling and engrossing drama. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, known for his work on the Rob Reiner films A Few Good Men (1992) and The American President (1995) but perhaps more recognizable for his TV work on The West Wing among other shows, is a master of intelligent dialogue and The Social Network, with its fast-talking super-genius college kids out to take over the world, is the perfect venue for his writing. I got a sense that lightning-quick dialogue really did come from these brilliant young kids, as opposed to the more stylized manner of speaking in Juno (2007), which was not believable in real life but was totally appropriate to that film.
Director David Fincher, who has moved away from the more overtly dark material of his early career (Se7en in 1995, Fight Club in 1999) to more complex and emotionally dark material of late (Zodiac in 2007 and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in 2008), is also well-suited to bring this story to the screen in a dramatic if perhaps not factually obsessed manner. Ultimately what we have here is an energetically mounted production, which is terrifically entertaining but makes me want to read the book to get more details. I’d say that The Social Network is a shoo-in for an Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination, and who knows, maybe this will be the one that wins Fincher the gold.
One of the best this year.
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