It started with a great idea: to take the entire college social experience and put it online. But college was just the beginning.
Back in 2003, businessmen were scratching their collective heads wondering how to monetize the Internet. THE SOCIAL NETWORK eloquently takes the confusion of that time and uses an exciting and enduring part of it, Facebook, to tell a very modern story of our times. But like the classic CITIZEN KANE, THE SOCIAL NETWORK is a familiar and detailed character study built around a corporate biography. Rarely has such dry subject matter been so hugely entertaining.
Told through a series of flashbacks induced by the myriad of lawsuits that cropped up as Facebook became successful, the story takes place mainly during 2003 when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was in college at Harvard. While there he and a few others were toying with different social networking platforms using the Internet. After Zuckerberg crashes the Harvard Internet servers with a website called Facesmash, he’s approached by some rich jock types to develop an idea they have for putting the social networking experience online. But Zuckerberg proves not to be a team player and soon is off on his own developing what eventually becomes Facebook. Along the way, according to this telling of his story, Zuckerberg loses the few friends he has and gains another 500 million or so.
Directed by David Fincher, the oh so very precise filmmaker behind FIGHT CLUB and THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, THE SOCIAL NETWORK is an excellent combination of careful direction and literate writing. The script is by Aaron Sorkin, the gifted screenwriter of films like A FEW GOOD MEN and television’s THE WEST WING. Over the years, I’ve been cool to Sorkin’s writing that often has his characters posturing greatly and yelling at one another. But this approach serves THE SOCIAL NETWORK well as Mark Zuckerberg and the other geniuses spout out oodles and oodles of technobabble. And we could care less what it all means, because it is so tremendously entertaining.
Filled with excellent performances headed by Jesse Eisenberg who bears an uncanny resemblance to the real Mark Zuckerberg, THE SOCIAL NETWORK has a cast that can heft Sorkin’s colorful and dense dialogue. As the words fly like weapons in an all out war, it is as though Fincher and Sorkin have constructed a sort of vicious ballet suitable for the stage.
And while Eisenberg sure looks the part, his staccato delivery seems exactly right for the role. In the trailer you hear one of the film’s most telling lines from Eisenberg playing Zuckerberg—he wants to do something special to get into an exclusive Harvard study club, because it leads to a better life. Such lines are tough to take in as the rapid fire dialogue reaches a dizzying pace. In a lesser film, such gobbly-goop would have felt hallow, but here probably because we all know and use Facebook, it seems perfect and makes for an exciting special effect on par with a summer event movie.
But as good as Eisenberg is in the film, Justin Timberlake will receive much of the attention for his turn as the troubled Napster creator Sean Parker. As Timberlake reveals Parker’s flaws under an over-sexed exterior, we forget JT the pop star and begin to notice the actor that he’s becoming. And while the story gives us all the young players as they move from the dorm room to the boardroom, it artfully exposes a central truth: that it took youthful almost juvenile personalities to create the Facebook we know and love today. It is the inherent sexuality to social networking that makes it addictive online, and who better to understand that than nerdy college guys.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK is a detailed entrepreneurial procedural outlining the formation of Facebook through a complex narrative structure, but it is at its core about the power of ideas and the excitement when those ideas are unleashed and become concrete. Facebook was at one time just a twinkle in one’s eye, and THE SOCIAL NETWORK is a rare film that captures the magic moment when the idea moves from the mind and beyond.
