David Fincher (2010)
It’s hard to believe that this wonderfully concise and entertaining film about the creation and creators of Facebook comes from the man whose previous picture was the interminably vague The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. David Fincher’s films had being getter longer, extending from Se7en (128 minutes), through Fight Club (139) and Zodiac (158), to Benjamin Button (166). The Social Network runs just two hours and there isn’t a dull moment. The film opens, at Harvard in the autumn of 2003, with an extended dialogue in a student bar between Mark Zuckerberg and his sort-of girlfriend, Erica Albright. The exchange is rapid and relentless and works on your nerves: Mark is alarmingly brittle and borderline paranoid, continuously questioning what Erica has said, finding hidden, negative meanings in it, expressing his own anxieties and prejudices. (The effect, oddly enough, isn’t that far removed from that of reading Ivy Compton-Burnett.) From this point onwards, the emotional velocity of the film is unyielding – yet it’s never monotonous. The Social Network is genuinely exciting because its subject and history are so contemporary and because the director and writer know exactly what they’re doing (and are doing something worthwhile). Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue is dazzlingly, insistently clever but the writer’s showing off never comes over as just showing off because the people in this film are hyper-articulate: the torrent of smart talk always seems to be in character. (The tagline for the film – ‘You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies’ – is worthy of the writing in it.)
Based on The Accidental Billionaires, a 2009 (non-fiction) book by Ben Mezrich, The Social Network has a clear narrative line, framed by scenes from the hearing of lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg by the twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (who approach Mark for help with programming their idea for a new website, ‘The Harvard Connection’, and claim he then pinched their idea for his own venture) and by Mark’s ex-best friend Eduardo Saverin (who helps him financially, and in other ways, with the launch of Facebook then gets frozen out of its prodigious profits). The tensions and ironies of the story, although obvious enough, give the movie a richly entertaining texture. We watch very clever people motivated by selfish needs and childish impulses to do ingenious things. We see the archaic social hierarchies of Harvard (the sadism that governs the rites of passage into the Phoenix club into which Eduardo is accepted and that Mark hasn’t a prayer of even getting tested for) – and the part they play in bringing about socially revolutionary technology. The Harvard that Fincher creates here is fascinating – the social layers, the mixture of grungy, boozy languor and extreme competitiveness, the idea of a closed world changing the world outside it. Mark expresses himself to an online audience partly as a consequence of his relative isolation. It’s a key stage in the evolution of this Twittering world – in which, however few or many friends you may have in your life offline, what you’re doing or have to say is reckoned to be of potential interest to everyone in cyberspace.
Except for Tilda Swinton, I didn’t think Fincher got an interesting performance from his large cast in Benjamin Button: his orchestration of the players here is acute and subtle. Jesse Eisenberg, who played the elder son in The Squid and the Whale, is marvellous as Mark Zuckerberg. There’s clearly a risk of this nerdy, to a large extent antisocial, character alienating the audience through his shut-off egocentrism. There’s not much less a risk that an actor, in trying to avoid that, will overcompensate by making Mark’s vulnerabilities too plain, to ingratiating effect. Eisenberg performs a considerable balancing act with great skill – he keeps us interested in Mark without letting us feel close to him. As Eduardo, Andrew Garfield is more evidently acting – but his wit and charm are vital: they establish a connection with the audience that the film needs (and which Fincher sees that it needs). Garfield is such a quicksilver performer that you never feel that you’re being manipulated to sympathise with Eduardo. Justin Timberlake, as Sean Parker, makes a terrific, fast-talking impression in his first scene – and his slightly mannered prettiness works well throughout, although the character of Sean develops into a relatively conventional baddie. The co-founder of ‘Napster’, an online music file-sharing system, Sean becomes a highly self-serving mentor to Mark and drives a wedge between him and Eduardo. You could say that Sean allows Mark to realise his true (immediately evident) potential as a user but the film is less distinctive once the action has shifted from Harvard to the cutthroat commercial world in which Sean Parker moves comfortably.
Armie Hammer plays both Winklevoss twins – with the help (according to an online article about the film) of ‘a body double and a whole lot of CGI’. The satire of the Winklevi (as Mark calls them in the plural), rich boys and rowing aces, is sometimes a little too broad. The sequence that sees them competing then socialising with Prince Albert of Monaco at the Henley Regatta is one of Fincher’s and Sorkin’s few failures although, such is the momentum of the film, it’s an almost welcome opportunity to draw breath. The Social Network is brilliantly cast all the way through. The actors in smaller parts – especially Douglas Urbanski as the Harvard President Larry Summers, and David Selby, John Getz and Denise Grayson as the senior attorneys involved in the lawsuits brought against Mark – seem effortlessly effective. They neatly create a character then let Sorkin’s lines do the rest, without pushing them at us. This is not a movie with great roles for women although Rooney Mara as Erica comes through strongly.
The editing and sound are superb – and not just from a technical point of view. The speed and smoothness of the cutting (by Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall) are elating without being flashy. A good example of this is a sequence in a club, where Mark is having a drink with and talking – or rather listening – to Sean. The sound perfectly captures not only the experience of fighting to hear an interlocutor when there’s deafening, pulsing noise going on around you in a crowded place but also the fact that – if you manage to make out what the other person is saying in such circumstances – your concentration on their words, combined perhaps with your slight inebriation, causes their voice to come through as if the Red Sea of noise had parted around it, giving their words an impact and authority that lodges them almost physically in your brain. The music (by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) and cinematography (Jeff Cronenweth) support the film without drawing attention to themselves.
The scene in which Eduardo vents his anger that Mark and Sean have reduced his share of the company from a third to less than one tenth of one percent is very well staged. This kind of sequence, coming near the end of a film, tends to be determinedly conclusive with one character gaining the upper hand unequivocally, the other(s) utterly vanquished. That doesn’t happen here: all three men look defeated and shaken by the experience – and the emotional dynamics here are a good example of the moral ambiguities of The Social Network, the fact that Fincher and Sorkin don’t simply take sides. In the last scene, one of the lawyers on Mark’s team (Rashida Jones) explains to him that they’ll be settling with Eduardo out of court: they’re worried that Mark’s personality will go down badly with a jury. The lawyer’s parting remark to Mark is, ‘You’re not an asshole – you’re just trying so hard to be one’. Mark goes to the Facebook page of Erica (who branded him an asshole in the film’s opening scene) and applies to be her friend. When the computer screen fades from the cinema screen, he’s still waiting for confirmation. The music over the closing credits is ‘Baby, You’re a Rich Man’. The very ending of The Social Network is, in other words, much more definitive than the rest of the film but I didn’t have a problem with Fincher’s sealing things up in this way. It serves in effect as a distillation, a confirmation of the audience’s feelings, about what we’ve just seen. Those feelings are a mixture of unease and exhilaration.
10 October 2010
