The Social Network (Four Stars)

U.S.; David Fincher, 2010

The Social Network — David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin‘s high-style, computer-circuit-fast tale of flashy programs and dirty deeds behind the 500 million-user Internet hookup phenomenon Facebook (or at least their version of it) — is obviously the next hot thing in award-caliber, critic-certified, “must-see” movies. It’s the primo right-now generator of Oscar buzz and of comparisons to Shakespeare and Citizen Kane.

That’s fine with me. This is the kind of movie they actually should be spending 50 million dollars to make in Hollywood. It’s a brainy, jazzy, cool, impudent, contemporary-hip, ultra-savvy, wired-in, high velocity show that races you through the beginnings of Facebook (hatched in a Harvard dorm by an angry sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg), through its mushroom-like growth on the web and resulting big-bucks corporatization, through all the human eggs you had to break to make this computer-hit omelet, and finally (via actual court transcripts), into the flurry of law suits, “Rashomon-ish” multiple viewpoints and bitter recriminations that almost inevitably exploded when its net worth hit the billions, and there was loot to be grabbed, and lawyers to pay.

The Social Network is almost wickedly entertaining, and it does something most movies don‘t these days. It celebrates smartness, gives us protagonists who are phenoms and prodigies of brain power rather than of sexiness, guts or toughness. (That’s part of why so many critics like it so much.)

The Mark Zuckerberg of the movie — whose real-life model apparently, and understandably, doesn’t like what he saw here — is a perpetually frowning, utterly irreverent, empathy-challenged, hoodie-clad techno-geek of nearly non-existent social skills and a nearly bankrupt couth account — a low-conscience, unrepentantly mean number-cruncher and people-user who arrogantly believes he’s smarter than almost everyone else around him, and whose only saving grace may be that he’s actually, maybe, sort-of right.

Then again, what’s “smart?“ Brains, intellect, or genius, maybe should be defined as a bit more than hatching a lucrative concept, writing a great computer program, and putting a billion in your bank account. (The source for Sorkin’s screenplay is a Ben Mezrich book, written almost concurrently, called The Accidental Billionaires.) Genius may actually be involved with something more scientific, artistic, mystical: with perceiving the ultimate, penetrating the great mysteries of life, reaching the multitudes, touching the soul of the happy few, or even improving the lot of humankind. Shakespeare. Kane.

But, in the top fillip of The Social Network’s many, many ironies, we see that maybe Mark and his fellow web movers and shakers — and the whole new social-communal wrinkle that they‘ve been chosen to dramatically represent — don’t really “need” things like empathy, sympathy, what we’d call humanity. This guy’s got something more tangible: a dynamite idea, a way to hook up 500 million Facebook “friends,” and get advertisers to cough up truckloads of cash. Ironically (of course), all this is accomplished by a guy who alienates everybody in person, including his date and his best friend.

Social Network starts with its very best scene: a fictional encounter in a Cambridge bar between glaring, fast-talking, self-aggrandizing Mark (played to perfection by modern movie geek-in-excelsis Jesse Eisenberg) and an ironic (naturally), knowing brain-babe named (fictitiously but appropriately) Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). Mark is trying to impress Erica with his I. Q., his talk-back panache, and his possible impending campus social triumphs, maybe election to the “final club.” He wants to wow her with sheer words-a-minute. In the dim, chatty little bar where it looks like so many quick hot fucks have been hatched, he keeps trying to drown her in verbiage, lashing back at her parries, pulling out his stud credentials and his coitus curriculum vita. Her scathing response is to tell him that he may think she’s rejecting him because he’s a geek, but it’s actually because he‘s an asshole.

Incensed, he stalks out of the bar, and back to his dorm room — shared with fellow geeks Dustin and Chris (Joseph Mazzello and Patrick Maple) — and hurls himself into a classic miffed geek’s techno-revenge. Mark disses Erica on-line, hacks into the Harvard dorm files, appropriates the girl student photos and sets up a nasty little website called FaceMash, in which horny losers or sex bullies, or just plain lonely guys, like himself, get to ogle the photos and rate who’s hot and who’s not. This site proves so popular, it crashes the university’s computer system.

The exploit also draws flack from the university, as well as the attention of two well-connected Harvard student society, twins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — played by the very well-connected 6’5” actor Armie Hammer, with the help of Fincher’s digital aces and actor/body double Josh Pence. The Winklevosses, and their business guy Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) want Mark to create a Harvard variant on other popular student computer social networks of the day at other colleges. He agrees, then joins with his best (maybe only) friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), to start planning and programming what eventually became, without the Winklevosses, FaceBook.

Not so fast. The Winklevosses sued. Others sued. Eventually, even best buddy Eduardo sued — after he got aced out of his top CEO slot upon, the arrival of just the kind of snazzy techno-stud who’d appeal to a jilted geek like Mark: Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the guy behind Napster, bringing with him a promise of dough, babes, lines of coke, incredible success and magnums of champagne (not necessarily in that order) and luring Mark to Palo Alto. (The real Sean Parker apparently doesn’t like his portrayal here either. Actually, I hear Parker is a mix of Mother Theresa, Elvis and Spider-Man.)

That suggests the litigious format in which we get most of the rest of the story: flashback-laced dramatizations of the college and court hearings spouting up around the various suits, charges and counter-charges ignited by all that rancor and all that moola. Who’s lying? Who’s right? Who knows? Who cares? As with the current movie Howl, which mined high drama and bawdy comedy out of the Allen Ginsberg Howl obscenity suits, The Social Network often uses actual court transcripts as its dialogue source, which means we may be hearing actual lies — or actual truth. The important thing though, is that it’s all actually entertaining.

With Sorkin’s dialogue and transcripts crackling like His Girl Friday on fire, and the revelations (true or made-up) popping like a private eye’s unvarnished notes, and with every scene steeped in director Fincher‘s trademark fancy menacing noir moodiness, the rest of Social Network proves definitively that you don’t have to pull a gun to thrill an audience.

It’s never as entertaining though, as that first, terrific, entirely fictional kiss-off scene in the bar. Watching The Social Network and reading the sometimes extravagant comparisons it’s generated to Citizen Kane, and Shakespeare, not to mention Paddy Chayefsky, “Twelve Angry Geeks,” and John Hughes, I began to wonder if the current movie strategy of presenting every fact-derived movie drama, fictionalized or not, with the real names of real people — like Shakespeare’s Holinshed-fed historical plays, but not like “Kane,“ which turned William Randolph Hearst into Charles Foster Kane, Marion Davies into Susan Alexander, and mixed Hearst’s history promiscuously with Welles’ own — isn‘t actually more trouble than it‘s worth.

We know, by now, that most docu-dramas mix fact with fiction, memoir with fantasy, and we’re aware that a movie like The Social Network is not the evening news — though actually, it’s probably more accurate, clear-eyed and less biased than Fox. So why not adopt “Kane’s” tactics?

I guess it’s because Zuckenberg is a star, and Facebook is a big brand name, and that’s part of how you sell movies. But I actually expected something more “Kane-ian” than what I got — expected to see Sorkin and Fincher mix more of the speed, snap and fact-drenched format of the Internet with their classic rapid-fire Hollywood social-dramatic story-telling. Maybe a quick bio of every character, a brisk low-down on every new situation, lots of background, lots of updates, lots of zipping back and forth. Whiz. Bang. But though The Social Network does some of that, it’s pleasantly old-fashioned in some ways. Happiest of all is its dependence on Sorkin’s dialogue, and on the high quality acting of its absolutely zero-cool cast.

Eisenberg makes Mark both pathetic and scary, never more so than in the show’s first scene and last shots — and he also makes the guy believably brilliant, a convincing innovator. Mara comes up with one of the ten greatest squelch scenes in movie history. (Unhappily she sort of vanishes from the movie afterwards, and so does Mark’s sex life, a mistake.)

Garfield makes you feel for a CEO, quite an achievement these days. I nominate Timberlake for “Bad Influence of the Year“ honors. Hammer pulls off a tour de force of digital twinnery; maybe he should now play Indiana‘s 6’5” Van Arsdales, Tom and Dick, in the ultimate inspirational tall twin sports bio. (Just kidding; he did a super job.) Doug Urbanski is believably mean and revoltingly snobbish, as then-Harvard president, Larry Summers. As Eduardo’s girlfriend Christy, Brenda Song is a song, and so is Dakota Johnson as Amelia.

Fincher seemed to give vent to almost every surrealist, artsy, fantastic impulse he had when he put Brad Pitt, in Benjamin Button, in reverse-rewind — and he’s been plunging us into psychological dread and horror ever since 1992‘s Alien 3. Fincher is a real movie stylist, and Fight Club and Benjamin Button are both about as well-visualized as a modern movie can be. But here, Fincher takes a step back, lets Sorkin and the script and actors take over more. It shows how much easier it makes a director’s job when he has good material.

Something bothers me about Social Network though, and actually, I’m not just trying to be perverse and pick on a favorite. Social Network deserves its plaudits, deserves all these prose-poems of aesthetic satisfaction it’s been getting. It’s a hell of a show. But Mark needs more of a backstory, especially a family backstory. Family counts in many success stories, as Armie Hammer would be the first to tell you. And I think it’s wrong to put Mark on his own. Also, the payoff doesn’t seem as exciting to me as the buildup, the climax less of a knockout than I wanted, especially from any movie being described by some as the new Kane. Citizen Kane could eat this movie for lunch. That’s okay. Kane cuts most other movies down to size as well, even great ones.

The Internet has changed us though, and one of the major alterations of consciousness is that these screens and their communications make us feel we’re not alone, when we are — and then realize that actually, we’re never alone. Ideas and words keep us going; all the ideas, and all the people out there are a great pool in which we can all swim.

The Social Network, almost a great movie, tells us that people and society have been changed by the computer age, in those ways and others — and also that, in some destructive ways, they’re still the same. It tells us implicitly that empathy matters more than millions of friends. But though that conclusion edifies and entertains, it doesn’t really dazzle us, or blind us with light. And I can’t help feeling that a lot of the audience may misinterpret Mark the way an older audience misinterpreted and made a hero of Wall Street‘s “Greed is Good” huckster prince Gordon Gekko — and make more of a hero than an anti-hero of Mark, because he’s smart, because he’s rich.

Sorkin actually turned down the Wall Street 2 assignment and maybe he was worried by that possibility of Gekko taking over again. In a society that worships moola as much as ours, it’s an occupational hazard.

This movie doesn’t entirely escape the pitfalls of success, and the perception of success, though it certainly tries to. For some, Social Network will be a cool show about a kid that made a billion. Actually, it’s not.

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