The Social Network

The Social Network (***1/2)

The Social Network is a well-acted, well-written, interesting movie, but it's also a movie that just won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and seems poised to win the Oscar as well, and with that in mind I found the movie a bit underwhelming. As the Golden Globe was being presented, whoever was accepting the award (not sure who it was, though I think it's usually a producer that accepts it) said that the movie used Mark Zuckerberg's story as "a metaphor for how we interact with each other." I'm not quite sure the movie really achieves something that lofty and that universal. Mostly it seems like the story of a genius with something hardwired wrong in his brain such that he can't help but push people away quarreling with other people from Harvard who are mostly just straight-up egomaniacal dicks.

Our protagonist is the aforementioned Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). As we meet him at the start of the movie he's out drinking with his girlfriend, Erica Albright, who breaks up with him as he's in the process of basically indirectly insulting her for going to the not exactly Ivy league equivalent Boston University. Zuckerberg talks a mile a minute, almost seeming unable to finish a sentence without changing the point of it midway through, and seemingly devoid of the barrier that most people have that separates what they're thinking from what they actually end up saying in polite conversation. Spiteful of Erica's rejection of him, Mark goes back to his dorm, cracks a few beers out of the fridge, writes a very stream-of-consciousness blog post where, among other things, he compares everybody who lives in Erica's dorm to farm animals, and ends up creating a website that matches up two random Harvard girls and people rank who's hotter. The site goes viral and crashes the Harvard network. This gets the notice of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, a pair of twins who exude every bit of the stereotypical arrogance and entitlement that typifies the Ivy League in most people's minds. They want to create a site like Myspace or Friendster, only with Harvard exclusivity, and they want Mark Zuckerberg to do it. Mark tells them he's in, but then dodges actually meeting with them over the coming weeks.

As he's dodging the Winklevosses, Zuckerberg approaches his roommate, Eduardo Saverin, with... basically the same idea that the Winklevoesses gave him, a social networking site. Saverin comes up with some start-up monkey, and he and Zuckerberg co-found The Facebook. Saverin is very much business-minded, and seems to relish his status as Facebook CEO, even before the site has gone anywhere. He wants to monetize the site as soon as possible. Zuckerberg disagrees on the basic that "Facebook is cool" and that throwing ads on it will make it not as cool. This disagreement will be the seed that, helped along by some other sleights along the way, eventually lead to Saverin suing Zuckerberg simultaneously while the Winklevosses are suing him for allegedly stealing their idea. And so the format of the story is this: we see a little bit of Zuckerberg developing Facebook at Harvard, and then we jump forward in time to a meeting of all the parties and their lawyers of one lawsuit or the other. Here, Zuckerberg, looking mostly disinterested and contemptuous of the entire proceedings, will deny parts or all of what's being described, and so it's basically up to us in the audience to decide what happened and what didn't. Eventually, Justin Timberlake shows up playing Sean Parker, the man who invented Napter, portrayed as sort of a man-child who's as much of a genius as Zuckerberg in his programming and his ideas, but who's wreckless and ultimately untrustworthy. His appearance further strains the friendship between Mark and Eduardo, and the film's second half follows Mark along a Godfather II-esque descent into isolation as he makes the wrong choices about who to trust.

The performances in the movie are all very good. Eisenberg deftly rattles off Zuckerberg's rapid-fire, unfiltered ramblings, and Andrew Garfield does a great job presenting Eduardo as a sympathetic figure and a relatable figure amongst a sea of Ivy League crazy people. Justin Timberlake is surprisingly good as well. Complementing the acting is a cool and unconventional score co-created by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails Fame that gives the very dialogue-heavy movie a frenetic energy that it wouldn't otherwise have. Aaron Sorkin structures the film well and makes it accessible and engaging, while actually seeming to having the scenes involving computers make sense, which is pretty rare for any movie.

All that said, though, I really don't see this movie as the sort of transcendent, generation-defining work of art that a lot people, including people in charge of doling out awards, seem to think it is. Facebook revolutionized the way we communicate and interact with each other, but that fact doesn't mean that a movie about its creation will necessarily hold great secrets about society or the human condition. This is an insular movie about prodigies and eccentrics who went to school at Harvard, where people adhere to arcane traditions and where people care about their social status a thousand times more than most anyone else. By its nature, The Social Network is a movie about exceptional people interacting with exceptional people, and the everyman/woman really doesn't make an appearance in the movie except maybe as Erica Albright, who exists only in the periphery of the movie.

I'm also not sure the movie really achieves what it wanted to achieve in it's portrayal of Zuckerberg, that being a man with at least the capacity of being a good person who gets steered in the wrong direction. While trying not to spoil it, there's a scene at the end that involves Zuckerberg sitting in front of his laptop, blank-expressioned, periodically refreshing a Facebook page waiting for an update. I heard a little bit of the DVD commentary for this scene, and Sorkin and the actors seemed to think the scene evoked some vague hopefulness. To me, Zuckerberg comes across in the scene as pitiful and border-lined stalkerish. Maybe upon further viewings more shades of grey will appear in the movie, and I'll see some redemptive qualities in Zucerkberg that will paint the last scene in a different light, but as it stands now, the way I see it, The Social Network's version of Mark Zuckerberg (and I honestly have no idea how the real-life man compares) is merely a genius who's kind of an ass who reaps everything, good and bad, that comes with that. Nothing more nothing less.

Basically, I'm not sure I see the same complexities in the movie that others do. Is it an entertaining watch? Absolutely. Is it my favorite of movie of the year? Were I to have DVDs of them stacked all I a row, I think I'd find myself much more likely to put Inception or King's Speech in my player for another watch than Social Network.