The Social Network (Friday, October 1, 2010) (126)

I think Mark Zuckerberg is a fascinating person. From everything I have read and seen about him he is a computer genius who was able to synthesize technical code-writing with the youth zeitgeist at the exact moment it would work best. Later he was able to make some very significant business moves (some of them unethical) that led him to more than $1billion in worth and his company to significant cultural relevance. All the time he was doing this, it seems he was never able to make human connections, letting his feelings of low self-esteem and his deep sense of pride in his own knowledge-base get in the way of his connections to friends and business associates. I might call him a bit of a sociopath (or at least someone with a disorder somewhat like Asperger's) - someone who does not have violence in him, but rather the complete lack of tools to deal with the world emotionally.

Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher's film The Social Network attempts to look at Zuckerberg and understand what drove him in the early years of Facebook and what made him who is his (and his company what it is as a result). Sadly we really don't get much depth at all beyond the superficial character assessment I wrote above. The characters in the story, Zuckerberg most prominently, don't grow over the course of the film. Some of them make smart moves, some make dumb moves, but almost all of them are kids behaving the way people in their early-20s behave - no matter how good their ideas are or how much money they have.

The punchy script by Sorkin is much more an example of his showy, high-polished dialogue style, than of anything any 19-year-old would ever say. The film has no particular visual or emotional style from Fincher (who previously made one of the most beautiful emotional stories of recent memory in Zodiac). Much has been written about how this is an "important" movie or a "defining" movie of our times. I didn't see that at all. I thought it was a very well-crafted story that is based on a true Shakespearean and Classical narrative. At no point did I see depth or significance on the screen.

The story is told through the framing device of two depositions for two lawsuits involving Zuckerberg and the ownership of Facebook. The film opens with Zuckerberg(Jesse Eisenberg), a brash Harvard computer science undergrad, on a date with his girlfriend who goes to Boston University. He is talking on and on about the importance of getting into one of the elite old-fashioned social clubs on campus. The girl doesn't understand why he's so fixated on it (and frankly, aside from the sad psychology of a high school dweeb looking to finally fit in, we don't understand it either). He makes a thoughtless comment about how she's not as smart as he is and she breaks up with him and verbally slaughters him, calling him an asshole (which he seems to be).

In response, he goes back to his dorm room to blog about what a bitch she is and then as he gets more and more drunk, writes a website to rank girls on campus in terms of hotness. (I guess we are supposed to think that Zuckerberg's brain is so juvenile that he responds to one woman by attacking all women. It might be realistic, but it's pretty facile, no?)

In the drama that follows, he ultimately is contacted by the Winklevoss twins (along with a cohort devoid of any personality) who try to get Zuckerberg to write a website they've been thinking about for a long time: a social network like Friendster or MySpace but with the exclusivity of only listing Harvard students, thus making others on the outside want to get in. Zuckerberg catches on to the idea immediately.

He goes to his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who comes from some tremendous amount of Brazilian money and agrees with him to create a website they would call "The Facebook" (ultimately the article would be dropped) that does what Zuckerberg has been asked to do - but never telling Saverin about the prior agreement.

After a few months, thefacebook.com launches, kicking on a long story of Winklevoss emotional, social and legal battles. Zuckerberg and Saverin, meanwhile are constantly butting heads in their endeavor as Zuckerberg has one vision for the company (to make it very big, to keep it ad-free and exciting for as long as possible) and Saverin has a different idea (to monetize the site as soon as possible and see the ad-dollars roll in).

Zuckerberg ultimately consults with Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) a party-loving wildman who had previously created the online music site Napster. Parker has lots of money contacts and a lot of experience with online companies. He drives a wedge between the Facebook partners that ultimately results in a lawsuit.

Throughout this story, Zuckerberg is constantly faced with questions of who his real friends are, how he can make new friends, and what he has to do to keep his old friends. There is a constant reminder the the main character is obsessed with fitting in and that he's responsible for this site that brings people together - but that he's unable to do connect to people in his own life. To me, this is lightly interesting, but mostly really trite. It's like a movie about a blind man who can see the future. It's a particular Classical concept, but not anything particularly deep or interesting.

The writing throughout is very Sorkiny, to coin a term. Aaron Sorkin loves very fast, punchy dialogue where characters speak in full, perfect sentences, never pause to think of their next line and never are at a loss for the most perfect, cutting and funny metaphor or figure of speech. I find it exhausting and totally unrealistic. You might as well have 20-year-old drunk American undergrads speaking Finnish or Tagalog - it's equally true-to-life.

Meanwhile, the portrayal of Zuckerberg is very fair and rather complimentary, I think. He does not come off nearly as dark as I might have thought. He is at his core a nice guy who just has no social graces. He says exactly what is on his mind and he lives with he constant knowledge that he's the smartest guy in the room.

He also is clearly very lonely and not incredibly comfortable with women (strangely for all the wild sex in the film, we never see him even kiss a girl). He is always looking to fit in, but is never really able to do the follow-up work that friendship requires. The very reason he was able to write the program code for the Facebook site is because he was able to lock himself in a room for weeks on end with only limited social interaction. (This reminds me of a Malcolm Gladwell thesis... oy vey.)

This is all very nice, but it is not really deep. Eisenberg does a good job with this role, but I don't think there's all that much there in terms of emotion. Zuckerberg is a dork who wants to fit in. I don't know - that doesn't seem like the hardest character to play.

I was also a bit annoyed that aside from the fast-talking girlfriend in the first scene and the lawyer in Zuckerberg's deposition (played by Rashida Jones) there are absolutely no women of substance in this film. Beyond that, all Harvard and Stanford women shown here are hot sluts looking to bang computer science students - who are all hot guys in their own right. It's a big ridiculous, dontcha think? (We couldn't have gotten one pimple-faced four-eyed dork on screen, even for a moment?)

Aside from the sometimes clever, mostly disorienting switch between the two depositions and the flashbacks, there is really no style in this film - something I think Fincher has done beautifully in past movies. Everything is so very straightforward that it feels like it could have been directed by just about any Hollywood hack (which is basically the same thing I felt about Benjamin Button). This is upsetting to me. If there was any director who I would think could direct a film about a young man's psychology and darkness (because I think screwing friends and unethical business dealings is dark), it would have been Fincher. But we get almost nothing aside from the super banal facts about his character that we already know from news reports.

Again, I don't see this as an important movie. Is it important because it's a film about a man with no social connections making a website about social connections and that is somehow emblematic of our society? My answer to that is: Meh. Who cares? I could get that insight by watching a two-minute segment on the Today Show on a Tuesday morning. People are weird and have all sorts of weird views of social interaction. So what?

This is a very old, traditional story of friendship and betrayal. Unless you're going to give me something deeper than superficial psychology, I'm not really interested. This is a well crafted film, to be sure - I would certainly aspire to speak to my drunk friends as well as Sorkin's characters speak to theirs - but it is not interesting at all.

Stars: 2 of 4