Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake
Rating 5 out of 10
According to a lot of the rest of the world, The Social Network is the best movie of the year.
I'm having a hard time understanding why.
The Social Network is the story of Facebook or, more to the point, the site's creator Mark Zuckerberg, who, if the movie is to be believed, is a misogynistic, Type A with more work ethic than compassion.
According to the film, Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) isn't good with girls. Frankly, he isn't much good with anyone--male or female. The movie opens with him and his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) sharing a beer at a local bar. He goes to Harvard and, as he points out with contempt, she's a student at Boston University. In other words, to his mind, he's slumming it. Perhaps that's why he doesn't notice her frustration at his self-possessed rant against the Harvard club system. She takes a sip of her beer, comes to her senses and dumps him before the opening credits appear. Like a lot of college guys, Zuckerberg deals with this perceived injustice by drinking. Unlike a lot of guys, he blogs while he drinks. After indelicately comparing women to farm animals (wait...is there a delicate way to do that?) he creates a site called FaceMash, which allows anyone with Internet access to judge the physical assets of Harvard's female co-eds against one another.
This little stunt, which generates so much traffic that it ends up immobilizing Harvard's network, catches the attention of three upperclassmen, including the creepy Winklevoss twins, who ask Zuckerberg to help build a campus social networking site called HarvardConnect.
Zuckerberg takes the idea and runs with it...as his own. Several weeks later, he launches called The Facebook.
Dashed hopes, failed expectations, multi-million dollar lawsuits, and a manic Sean Parker (played with glee by Justin Timberlake) follow. Just another day in the life of Facebook. Here's the rub though: I hated every single person in this movie and I'm pretty sure that wasn't an accident. The Social Network is like a drama that might play out in wall posts on Facebook. The betrayal! The deceit! The backstabbing!
The movie does do a good job of showing these kids as a part of a generation that has been conditioned to believe in how special, unique and deserving they are. A little like Facebook I suppose. You have to be a little arrogant to believe that your "friends" actually care about what you ate for lunch. Of course, arrogance is often a personality trait in great leaders, but I would be shocked to find that Zuckerberg is as atrocious a communicator as this film makes him out to be.
And that leads me to the biggest problem with The Social Network: a lot of it simply isn't true. Of course, a nugget of the truth exists--Zuckerberg was sued by the Winklevoss twins as well as his business partner Eduardo Saverin after Zuckerberg creatively and cruelly pushed Saverin out of the company. Many facts though, such as the opening break-up scene that supposedly inspired Zuckerberg's social media creationist ways, are patently false.
Based off the book The Accidental Millionaires, so many liberties are taken with the real story of Facebook's founding that it can hardly even be labeled as "based on a true story" and interestingly, it's not. Sorkin has admitted in a number of interviews while promoting the film that he took a fair amount of license for dramatic flair. Yet, he still chose to use Zuckerberg's name...and Saverin's and Parker's. Of course, all this subterfuge didn't hurt anyone: The Social Network was a huge hit and made Zuckerberg TIME's Man of the Year. The last time I checked Facebook was continuing to grow on 500 million users. And, maybe, I have to wonder--was that the whole point of The Social Network?
At the end of The Social Network, I felt like I had just watched a magic trick. An aptly directed (though I don't agree this is David Fincher's best film--Zodiac is far better in every way), well-written one, but a magic trick nonetheless. The Social Network isn't much more than a two-hour behind-the-scenes infomercial for Facebook. Sure, the Eisenberg version of Zuckerberg may come off as abrasive, but he's hard working and earnest. The lie that begins the entire charade (remember the girlfriend in the bar?) comes around in the end to give Zuckerberg a shot at redemption--through the power of Facebook.
I didn't hate The Social Network, but I didn't much like it either. It feels like a ruse; a movie that was supposed to expose the dirty underbelly of Facebook but instead had all the bite of a gossip website--albeit one that helped with brand recognition.
I would hate to see The Social Network win Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards. People may try and use words like "scathing" to describe Zuckerberg's portrayal, but I would argue that it and a lot else about The Social Network are shallow. The film is less about Facebook and more about the mythology of Zuckerberg. The Social Network is like a page on Facebook--it's all about personal promotion making it hard to figure out what exactly is the truth.
