Not Only a Spike on the 2010 Radar but a Refreshing Return to Razor-Sharp Filmmaking Precision

Rating: 8/10 (4 November 2010)

We get the film version of every best seller, graphic novel, comic book series, war and topical phenomenon within reach. And too frequently, they're assessed on the strength of how committed they are to the source. Numerous critics haven't liked The Social Network because it doesn't follow the facts. The Guardian pondered whether a 26-year-old entrepreneur truly ought to have his name muddied in a foggy fact/fiction jumble for the movie-going public's common entertainment. Zuckerberg himself, the film's core subject and fascinating protagonist, said at a conference he really wished that nobody had made a movie about him, at least while he was alive.
I fully understand and sympathize with these points. Part of me feels it's unfair to not only fictionalize but hold up to public censure the short life of a twentysomething. But this is a useless attitude toward evaluating movies. What counts is whether a movie is high-quality and gratifying, not whether it's true to a novel, play, real-life figure. To be sure, countless films are magnificent for the reason that they interpret their initial sources into cinema vernacular. Gangs of New York's factually inaccurate, sure, but it's profoundly true to the import and reality of its depicted era and way of life. Hitchcock was painstakingly lucid with facts in The Wrong Man but at the expense of the spirit and power of its characters.
Fincher's known for dark, meticulous dramas that tap into contemporary society's anxieties and obsessions. This one dashes through two hours of magnetic dialogue. It makes an ironically incommunicable account lucid, captivating. Many might understandably think it hopeless to make a movie about a computer programmer, as programming's just writing in a language nobody in the audience understands. Still Fincher and Sorkin dramatize the Facebook phenomenon in language that carries the import of the social media revolution with the same degree of vibrance and wit that Network did.
To conjure up Facebook, Zuckerberg needed to be familiar with next to zilch about relationships or human nature, and this film's version of him isn't. What he needed was the capacity to perceive a way to engage the human race in the small world phenomenon. I maybe know 50 of my Facebook friends well, 100 I added just for going to the same high school at the same time, another 100 friends of friends. I can't recall the last time I received a Request from anyone with whom I didn't share at least one "Mutual Friend." The film begins with a date between Zuckerberg and Erica. He anxiously nurses a beer and speed-talks through an uncompromising cross-examination, almost vicious one-upmanship. Erica breaks it off, reprimands him, leaves. Erica (a storybound character) is correct, but at that instant she puts Zuckerberg in business. He goes home, begins hacking into the "facebooks" of Harvard dorms to accumulate campus girls' head shots. He programs a page where they can be ranked for their attractiveness. Chauvinistic and criminal, this proves so trendy, it crashes the campus servers. After it's harvested by a humdrum website called "The Harvard Connection," Zuckerberg propagates it into Facebook.
Programming vernacular and methods are broadly recognized, but it's he who discerns how he can associate them with a networking site. Facebook's brilliance entails not mental keenness but its scheme of mingling self-image with social interface. Zuckerberg longs to hit back at all the Harvard prudes he wishes would like him, so he absorbs them in a surrounding substance that's even now on the rise. This is the very reason why I feel The Social Network deserves the Oscar win for Best Editing. It has an associational effect of overtonally aggregating the nature of time, various rhythms to energize the pace and intellectual shot-by-shot links to create an emotional version of the narrative rather than a plodding entrepreneurial dossier.
The depositions' testimony makes it clear there's a case to be made against Zuckerberg, many of them sins of omission. It's left to the final crawl to explain how they turned out. The point is to show an interaction of undergraduate chaos, enormous amounts of money and manic energy. Zuckerberg may have had the acument that produced Facebook, but he didn't do it single-handedly, and the movie gets a recounting by cutting between various lawsuit depositions. We gain understanding of the Harvard social structure, a campus where skill enlists affluence and relations as achievement factors. We meet the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer), moneyed hunks who suppose Zuckerberg stole their idea. We meet Eduardo Saverin, played by a warmly relatable Andrew Garfield, Zuckerberg's closest (sole) friend, who was made CFO, lent the enterprise the money that it required to commence and was driven away. Most remarkably we meet Sean Parker, the founder of two renowned, momentous startups.
It's the capricious Parker, fresh out of work but stretched out in celebrity and past triumph, who seemed to be the only person to make Zuckerberg blink, much less haul him into the big time. He rationalized why Facebook needed to move to Silicon Valley. Why more money would come from venture capitalists than Eduardo would ever boost with his humble calls to flush New Yorkers.
The dialogue has the pace, spontaneity of Paddy Chayefsky or a Howard Hawks film. Eisenberg, who's concentrated on playing feeble or fastidious, is an infrared homing beacon hunting his own goals. Timberlake stunningly triumphs with the cunning task of playing Parker as both a strutting show-off and someone who takes on Zuckerberg as an academic match. We could see them as symbolic of the relationship between the real-life story and this film.