Fincher and Sorkin in complete harmony

Rating: 10/10 (28 October 2010)

Prior to its release, if one peg could be attached to David Fincher's The Social Network, it would be "The Facebook Movie". However, now that the finished product has seen the light of day, the only peg that applies is "work of art". That evolution from opportunism to genuinely fascinating artistic expression is a major part of what makes The Social Network work so well.
So how did this happen? Turns out, good, old-fashioned movie-making can take you as far as you're willing to go. Beginning at a script level, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has devised a narrative that touches eternal themes of friendship, betrayal, and class. It is also expertly put together by Fincher, who avoids his usual visual trickery-as in the adrenaline fueled, punch drunk photography in his Fight Club- in favor of a more sedate and clinical approach to the material.
The film begins on a chilly late fall evening in a college town dive bar. Wild noise crowds the soundtrack as the audience joins two voices (one male, the other female) in mid-conversation. The scene is a verbal high-wire act between Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), who will break up with Mark by the scene's end. The two fire back witty exchanges of dialogue that force the audience to adjust to a much faster pace than they are accustomed to.
That is the method of this movie: moving at high intellectual speeds and expecting the audience to keep up. Sorkin's screenplay forgoes the tiresome process of explain how a website is created and instead focuses on strict character development. It doesn't matter if the audience doesn't know a single line of computer code because it is always so obvious that the main characters know what they're talking about. It is important to know how smart these character are and how passionate they are about what they're doing.
The Social Network is essentially a movie with a revolving point of view, shifting from Zuckerberg to Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and the Winkevoss twins (both played, in a feat of stunning special effects, by Armie Hammer). All claim to have a large share in the creation of Facebook, and their legal depositions provide the movie's flashback structure. The Social Network forces the audience to sit up and actively engage in what is happening on screen. This is a movie where allegiance will shift from character to character, and the truth always seems tenuous and uncertain.
Some have claimed that the vague nature of "truth" offered by Fincher and Sorkin discredits the entire picture. Nothing is further from the truth. A movie, even one based on a true story, can do what it wishes with the facts, so long as it remains compelling. Other articles have termed the film a hack-job against Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg. I would completely disagree with that notion. Both Fincher and Sorkin are notorious perfectionists in their given fields, and their empathy for Zuckerberg is what lingers with audience well after the closing credits. We may never like Zuckerberg, but Sorkin and Fincher let us in on trying to understand him. That is the true story of the movie. It's not 'The Facebook Movie", it's a character study of the highest order.