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 Opening
with a social maladroit’s inability to communicate with his real, live
girlfriend; her abandonment will set a young man into a tizzy of revenge
that will result in one of the most significant and controversial
inventions of this century. The irony of the creation of Facebook is in
its originator’s incapacity to cultivate any sort of normal relationship
with even those who would be his closest friends, choosing instead to
grow and nurture a device that brings together complete strangers over
the internet in a proximity that the inventor would probably never allow
in real life.
Director David Fincher’s biopic of Mark Zuckerberg, whose Facebook
website made him the world’s youngest billionaire, is also the story of
a late-bloomer overwhelmed with a success that could never occur in his
most elaborate fantasies. Capturing perfectly the ephemera of the
college experience of the early 2000’s (bedecked with Abercrombie and
Fitch and faux lipstick-lesbianism), Fincher grasps what is it to be
a young man coping with the first flushes of adult freedom, yet trapped
amongst people that you hate and who don’t understand you. It doesn’t
help that his subject makes himself a ready vessel for derision,
belonging to that special breed known as the computer nerd. The
isolation of spending every joyful minute alone in front of a monitor
combined with a stratospheric IQ has affected Mark Zuckerberg’s ability
to relate to flesh and blood human beings and given the young man a
contempt for those not in his intellectual class. The Social Network’s
cutting and smart script could be an analogy for the corruption of
sudden fame and money that Zuckerberg’s landmark website will bring
about later; however what makes that narrative chestnut compelling here
is not only its oddball subject, but also its exploration of the nuts
and bolts -- or scripts and chips -- behind Facebook’s initial rise, if
not the mass hypnosis the programme seems to have placed on the general
public. Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin wisely avoid attempting
to explain that public’s lemminglike willingness to hand the website
their intimate details for worldwide consumption and the lack of
boundaries that the current culture encourages, which could be an epic
in itself. Instead the focus is on the virus-like growth and popularity
of the application and its direct effect on those involved in creating
it. Who knew there were Facebook groupies?
Jesse
Eisenberg gives a great performance as Zuckerberg, so brilliant yet
socially inept as to make viewers wonder if he hasn’t got some form of
Asperger Syndrome. Equal parts Holden Caulfield and Ratso Rizzo,
Zuckerberg blurts unedited thoughts off the top of his head, oblivious
to his rudeness and uncomprehending when he’s rejected. Indeed,
Zuckerberg displays an almost-sociopathic nonchalance to the offence
he’s given the entire women’s population of Harvard after creating a
hack programme that lines up purloined photos of every lady on campus
and asks viewers to choose the hotter of two students. Such challenges
to his superior intellect are met with a shark-like, dead-eyed blank
stare. He seems incapable of understanding ex-girlfriend Erica’s
indignation after he drunkblogs hurtful, intimate things about her after
their breakup. Direct explanations of his errors, like Erica’s
brilliant rejoinder, “The internet’s not written in pencil, Mark. It’s
written in ink.” fail to compute and are dismissed as a lack of humour
on the part of those affronted. Andrew Garfield in smart suits and
early Naughties’ vertical hair wall fringe, is puppy-eyed as
Zuckerberg’s patient best mate, Eduardo Saverin, who tries to steer
Zuckerberg around his self-created social pitfalls, believing in his
friend so much as to be the first investor in his little computer
project. Once Zuckerberg’s experiment begins to bear fruit, expanding
its reach far beyond Harvard’s ivy-covered walls, the vultures and
hangers-on come running, including a trio of upperclassmen from a posh
fraternity who claim Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them.
Included in the three are the Winklevoss twins, a pair of pampered,
privileged brothers who in their thoughtless condescension to the nerdy
nobody create a monster. Aaron Sorkin’s skillfully layered screenplay
never makes a clear cut argument for who stole what from whom, allowing
the viewer to make up their own minds. We spend the last half of the
film ping-ponging back and forth from Zuckerberg’s lawsuits with the
“Winklevii” and another with his former bud, Saverin into flashbacks of
the circumstances that lead up to the litigations. Saverin’s
allegations are made much clearer as he is shifted into the seat of the
film’s sympathies, having had his place as CEO, advisor and closest pal
of Zuckerberg completely usurped by Napster inventor and eventual
Facebook officer, Sean Parker. Somewhere between clever irony and crass
gimmickry lies the choice of Justin Timberlake to play Parker, the
Justin Timberlake of computer geeks everywhere. Parker is the bad boy
of the internet set, spending nary a sober moment, sailing into the most
exclusive clubs and restaurants like a rock star … or Justin
Timberlake. All of this is blinding to Zuckerberg who could never have
dreamed the life that Parker lays out before him. The starstruck
college student’s genius somehow fails to comprehend that Parker, for
all his fame is in effect a transient living from place to place; full
of brilliant ideas and bountiful connections, but essentially homeless
and prone to arrest for his uncontrollable vices. Saverin isn’t as
impressed, but can’t compete against Parker’s tidal wave of star power.
Watching the loggerheads between his old and new friends play out with
the aloofness of one observing a science experiment, Zuckerberg does
nothing to stop Saverin being cheated out of his share of Facebook.
We’re left to question whether the motivation for this betrayal was
passive-aggressive payback for petty differences -- Saverin’s admittance
to a frat Zuckerberg coveted, his way with the ladies, his wealth --
that could only have been substantial to someone whose self-absorption
cannot be measured. Somehow, for all Zuckerberg’s quirks and downright
foul behaviour, Fincher and Sorkin do actually manage to make him into a
sympathetic character: The film’s last scene of the now-massively
wealthy Zuckerberg depending on his own invention to try to contact the
girl who got away is one of the most memorable final images of recent
cinema.
The
Social Network’s great young cast delivers rich performances that are
worth the price of admission. The adroitness of Sorkin’s modern
morality tale about the rise of the world’s youngest billionaire comes
to life in Fincher’s deft hands, creating one of the coolest, sharpest
films of the year.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
October 1st, 2010
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