LITTLE ROCK — By now, even the least technologically savvy have heard of Facebook, but in director David Fincher’s new film The Social Network, which opens Friday, the story is told of exactly how, in the fall of 2003, a brilliant but socially awkward sophomore at Harvard started something that changed the way the world lives — a story that many people may not know.
It's one worth seeing, whether you're on Facebook or not.
The writing is, in a word, fantastic. That may not come as a surprise to folks who know the name of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who wrote for the West Wing and created Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Here his dialogue is quick and witty, poignant when it needs to be. There's a lot of it, but it's never too much, whether the conversation is SAT scores or shareholder stakes.
Of course it helps that the casting is perfect and the actors even more perfect. Justin Timberlake as party-focused but penniless Napster founder Sean Parker? Why not. He's great at it. And Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg is phenomenal. We cried for him in the Squid and the Whale. We laughed at him in Zombieland. Whether we should love him or hate him in The Social Network isn't always clear, but the performance is going to get some response.
And, of course, to the generation who has embraced Facebook, director Fincher almost needs no introduction. He made Se7en and Fight Club. More recently he gave us The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. If that alone doesn't prove he knows how to shoot a film, the little details, like the way he lights Timberlake’s face in a dance club or makes the same shot — two parties squaring off over a table in a legal dispute — seem different, will.
But the film is not perfect, thanks to a few curious inconsistencies. It's heavy on the building of Facebook and light on the dispute that fractured it. Its characters also lack a bit of depth, whether it's Zuckerberg himself, the people who claim he stole their idea, or anyone in his immediate circle that's not Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield). Their talk may be clever — even hilarious at times — but many come off as nothing more than roles in a story and not real people, which it's important to remember they are.
Be warned also that if you want some quasi-documentary philosophical analysis of what Facebook is and what it means on some metacultural level, this is not it. The answers are not really here. If you try to look for them, you'll be disappointed because all you'll see is clashing egos and a relentless pissing contest of intellects, and it's hard to accept that one of the most important social phenomenons of recent history only came about because some college girl called her dork boyfriend a dick.
Then again, maybe there's some ultra-ironic truth in that.
As for truth in The Social Network, it's hard to say. It's based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, who famously chronicled the exploits of several MIT students taking on the game of blackjack in Bringing Down the House, which also got adapted into a movie. In both books, Mezrich has been noted for taking artistic license with the truth, and it's anyone's guess how much of what was there got lost in translation onto the big screen.
Perhaps the movie admits as much when, near the end, one character observes that most emotional testimony is exaggerated. The rest is lies. Facebook may be the badge of a generation, but certainly there are those who would say it's fitting for a story about the site composed of little more than these two elements. At least it makes for a good story.
And it's extremely well told.