Engaging but not profound

Rating: Null/10 (29 October 2010)

The Social Network's promotional tag line reads, "You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies". As a matter of fact, the narrative seems to suggest, you don't get a site as global or profitable as Facebook without some serious big-money investment. Indeed, without the flashy business bluffing of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), thefacebook.com remains the popular but unendurable dream-that-never-was of Havard friends and co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).
This point is significant: the raison d'être for the film, both in story and narrative terms has its very seeds in the gem of Facebook itself. The very nature of this story is governed by its necessary pace: it's arguable that Facebook could only become the site that it now is by expanding so rapidly that it could beat any other would-be competitors and meeting the profit demands of short-term capital. This would preclude Saverin and Zuckerberg making it alone, and thus in turn making it at all – and so, since their final decision to sue is because of Facebook's international success, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) would never have sought compensation from Zuckerberg for violations of their intellectual property.
This is the quiet tragedy at the heart of Fincher's film. But if this is inherent in the material, the director doesn't stress it. From the outset, there's that contradiction familiar to all of Fincher's films: a certain level of interest in the material as it presents itself to him, but a careful, deliberate detachment from it on his own part. This means that even if Fincher knows how to stage a scene and his directorial style is consistently immaculate, his work as a whole is uneven; when the script is formidable, you get something like Zodiac (2007), when patchy, something like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).
Fincher's latest film presents its world in a matter-of-fact manner, and in doing so creates an apparently authentic sense of life at one of the world's most elitist institutions. In having events unfold mostly through Zuckerberg's viewpoint, though, Sorkin's script lacks the critical emphasis required of Fincher to make a genuinely provocative film that reaches beyond the betrayal of friendship between Zuckerberg and Saverin.
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