Doesn't Fully Connect

Rating: 6/10 (26 November 2010)

David Fincher has always been one of my favorite directors, a visual stylist unafraid of pushing boundaries or putting his full effort into controversial (and sometimes even grotesque) scripts. With the exception of "Alien3," my affection for this auteur has maintained stable through the years; even more difficult, patience-testing, mainstream-leaning works like "Zodiac" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" maintain a human solidity and warmth at their labyrinth cores. And hot on the trail of those mainstream-leaning works comes "The Social Network," a film that has been hailed as capturing the Zeitgeist of our time (embodied in Mark Zuckerberg -- played here by Jesse Eisenberg -- the founder of Facebook); and while nobody ever said a Zeitgeist needed to be embraced by all, I found the coldness of the film overall to be its most notable (and most crippling) aspect. The film presents Zuckerberg as a motor-mouthed, self-absorbed, and socially inept college kid who, in a fit of anger over a girl who has just snubbed him, germinates the seed of Facebook over the course of a few drunken hours (the film will return to the theme of romantic/personal failure as the seed of vengeance-through-technology retribution more than once); the remainder of "The Social Network" criss-crosses between present day and flashback, chronicling the bridges Zuckerberg burned as quickly as they were built, and the wake of angry, ripped-off colleagues and contemporaries left in the dust as Facebook became the Internet's premier social networking site. While Aaron Sorkin's whip-cracking dialog all too often feels like a less endearing, less caustic version of Mamet-speak that is never as clever as it thinks it is, the real surprise of "The Social Network" is the utter conventionality of Fincher's direction. For a film as jam-packed with characters as this, we never feel especially close to anybody, and Zuckerberg (who is essayed with an admirable lack of grace, couth, and empathy by Eisenberg), who dominates the proceedings, is both loathsome and pathetic. Perhaps a second viewing will be more fulfilling, but for now, "The Social Network" is a rather unappetizing contemporary history lesson without much beyond its incendiary content to recommend it. Actually, it is worth viewing for the fantastic minimalist score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.