Review: The Social Network

05 November 2010 - 01:21 By Tymon Smith
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The Social Network is the most critically praised film of the year. It seems that no one can say anything bad about the film detailing the founding of the world's most popular social networking site.

Film: The Social Network

Director: David Fincher

Cast: Jessie Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Rooney Mara, Armie Hamner, Max Minghella, Justin Timberlake

It is based on a book by Ben Mezrich, which relied heavily on interviews with people who felt swindled by Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg, but which didn't include any input from Zuckerberg himself.



In the words of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, this is a film about a "group of, in one way or another, socially dysfunctional people who created the world's greatest social networking site".

And the irony flows thick in this rapid talking picture of a socially awkward computer geek fuelled by desire for acceptance by the elite of Harvard and bitterness at a girl who tells him that he'll always have problems with girls - not because he's a geek, but because he's unpleasant.

Sorkin has made his name in films and television, from bringing the kind of overlapping lightning fast exchanges that characterised the screwball comedies of the 1930s and '40s (Bringing Up Baby, The Front Page, The Philadelphia Story) to the dramatic worlds of the army (A Few Good Men) and the White House (The West Wing).

Here Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and his college friends blister through their conversations, interrupting each other's thoughts and finishing each other's sentences in a typical Sorkin style that works as a mimicry of the online world of instant messaging and back and forth e-mails.

For the first half hour or so of the film this is engaging, but soon you begin to feel that a little more room may have made the characters more than narcissistic rich kids embroiled in a middle-aged corporate power battle.

Director David Fincher taps into Sorkin's verbal energy with short scenes and intercutting between the now, in which Zuckerberg is fighting two court cases - one brought by his former CFO and best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) who was sidelined from the company, and the other by rich twins and rowing jocks Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Hamner) who claim that he stole the idea for Facebook from them.

After being dumped by his girlfriend (Mara) the surly, drunken Zuckerberg heads off to his dorm room, blogs some horrendous things about her, then hacks into the sites of various college houses and sets up a program called Facemash, which rates various women against each other, racking up 22000 hits in a few hours, crashing the Harvard network and earning the attention of the "Winklevi" and their business partner Divya Narendra (Minghella) who want him to work on a dating site they're developing.

What follows is the tightly paced, reasonably gripping tale of how Zuckerberg stole their idea, developed his own version of it and turned it into Facebook. Along the way he alienates and cheats his best friend Saverin, falls for the glamorous lifestyle of hipster and Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and ends up as the world's loneliest man running the world's biggest online social network.

Fincher produces his most well-rounded, though not most interesting work to date, putting himself in the category of formerly innovative filmmakers who reach the point at which they can claim the general respectability that earns Oscar nominations.

The performances, especially Jessie Eisenberg as Zuckerberg and Andrew Garfield as Saverin, are spot-on, although Timberlake's showing as the glib, drug-addled, paranoid Parker is not much more than a portrayal of Justin Timberlake.

While there's little on the surface to fault about The Social Network, its relentless dialogue and lack of back-story leave you wondering if, like the phenomenon it describes, it's a bit of a big fuss about nothing.

The lesson that the story teaches about Facebook is that computer smarts can't buy you happiness, but perhaps that's okay when you're a billionaire at 26 and your site has over 500 million users.

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