The Social Network (2010)

Director: David Fincher

Slick dramatization of the construction and meteoric growth of facebook, as told through a focus on its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Rather than a Zuckerberg biopic, this movie covers Zuckerberg's initial conception of some of facebook's foundational elements while a student at Harvard, the months he spent building the site, and the year or so immediately after, when the site grew at a freakishly exponential rate to quickly become a global phenomenon. It also happened to make Zuckerberg, then still barely in his mid-twenties, one of the richest people on the planet. The movie also depicts Zuckerberg as pulling a few semi-shady tricks, such as "borrowing" parts of his original concept from a pair of fellow Harvard students and elbowing out his former friend and initial investor in the site, Eduardo "Wardo" Saverin. Woven throughout the film are moments taking place in law offices, presumably a few years after facebook has exploded into a multibillion-dollar company, where Zuckerberg fends off lawsuits from people who seem to have some case for being owed at least some of Zuckerberg's immense wealth from the site.

This was actually the second time I watched The Social Network, and I still have some mixed feelings about it. This is true of all "biopic" or "based on real people and events" kinds of films or TV shows to me - one can never really know where reality ends and "artistic license" begins. And frankly, that's always far more palatable when we're dealing with long-dead people, such as the John Adams mini-series that recently rewatched and reviewed. Not to mention that that show was meticulously researched, based on reams of documentation. The Social Network, on the other hand, is about people who are all still very much alive and barely into middle age. More than that, though, is that there was very clearly some license taken to mold these real people more into more dynamic characters for a dramatic movie, rather than to offer authentic portrayals of them. This "punching up" of people never sits terribly well with me, and I can never shake the notion that many, many people watch such movies and equate it with reality - a very dangerous effect.

With all that said, I want to give my thoughts of the movie mostly as a dramatization. Yes, it has much larger themes that go well beyond the individuals involved, and those transcend however one might feel about using living people's lives as fodder for a scripted drama. My thoughts on the human-centered elements, though, will stay focused on the narrative and cinematic elements.

The Winklevoss twins - just two of several people who sue
Mark Zuckerberg for one reason or another. While the two
seem to have had a case, they are presented as just the sort
of entitled, privileged, and popular figures who stoke
resentment in the film's version of Zuckerberg.

The Social Network is a brilliantly done movie, no doubt. Everything about the story construction, pacing, acting, visuals, and sound is really hard to criticize in any way. Right from the jump, the script (written by dialog showman Aaron Sorkin) is off and running at 100 miles per hour, and within a few minutes, we're able to form a pretty strong opinion about the movie's version of Zuckerberg. Thanks to Fincher's tight, masterful direction, there's a buzz around seeing Zuckerberg pull together tidbits from others, meld them with his own ideas, and frantically employ his elite-level computer programming skills to obsessively build something that has changed life and communication as we all know it. There's not a wasted scene in this 2-hour film, with every one of them either advancing the plot or revealing something about the characters. This is unsurprising, given that the director was David Fincher - a man behind many great movies, including Fight Club, Se7en, and Gone Girl.

The dramatic elements are, I must admit, brilliantly crafted. I do want to emphasize that word - "crafted." While these are based on real people and real events, I didn't have to do any research to be pretty sure that the characterizations, words, and specific actions of every one were either exaggerated, massaged, or completely fabricated in the name of drama. I must say, though, that it works really well. Zuckerberg is portrayed as a pretty despicable, insufferably arrogant little man. His general intelligence and genius as a computer programmer are undeniable, but the movie makes it abundantly clear that its version of him is a guy who, shunned by his girlfriend, basically creates facebook in the throes of a petulant, misogynistic hissy fit. There are some glimmers, especially early in the movie, of a person who does have grander ideals about opening up communications to the betterment of humankind, but these aspects of his character are mostly kept on the backburner. For the most part, Zuckerberg is shown as a guy who feels spurned by women, condescended by richer and more popular people, and who is more interested in being right than in truly being loved. It's not exactly novel to dream up the "nerd who holds a grudge against those who overlooked him," but it is an interesting paradox to show that nerd become wildly rich and famous by building a system that is meant to help people open up to one another. And therein lies some of the depth of the movie. Made in 2010, only about five years after facebook's initial launch on a large scale, the world was still only just coming to realize that social networking sites were not exactly the utopias of human connection that many had hoped and believed they were or would be. And now, a solid 15 years after facebook's explosion onto the world scene, the questions it raises only become more imposing.

Whether through vicious put-downs or just his general
demeanor and posture, Eisenberg radiates condescension and
impatience during nearly every second of this movie. I'm no
great fan of the real Zuckerberg, but it's hard to avoid the
opinion that the movie exaggerated just how dislikable he is.

While Zuckerberg is portrayed mostly as a dislikable, self-involved villain, there is some complexity to him, the other characters, and their relationships with each other. There are more than a few shades of grey running throughout this film, such as who was really in the right when it came to the intellectual property of facebook. The way it's shown in the movie, Zuckerberg was pretty underhanded with more than a few people. At the same time, you can't help but think that most of the people who sue him are over-reaching a bit and not recognizing how Zuckerberg really was doing all the heavy lifting, in terms of the overall concept and the actual coding of the entire thing. The movie also does a good job of constantly presenting facebook as a conundrum. Almost from the jump, its shallow, addictive nature is presented and shown to be coming from less-than-noble elements of human nature. This theme alone makes the story engaging, and it will continue to do so for as long as social media is part of our lives.

A final thought on Aaron Sorkin's writing, and it's the same thought that I express regarding screenwriters who are the "dialog wizards" of the movie world. For a while, the three who have always come to my mind have been Sorkin, Tarantino, and Joss Whedon. Such writers are wonderfully clever and have fantastic minds and ears for snappy, catchy, and often hilarious dialog. Film after film, these writers have provided us with endless "quotable quotes" and memorable scenes, almost always from sharp, witty characters of their creation. However, such dialog magic can often threaten to trump the actual story or anything else happening on the screen, resulting in a sense that moments are contrived or manipulated just so a character can deliver a good zinger that the writer was proud of. It can also result in lines that may not sound natural from the mouths of a particular character. I had this feeling during much of The Social Network, with nearly every single character having just the right lightning-quick, whip-smart retort to whatever someone else says. While it makes sense to have a slighted, genius-level intellect like a Mark Zuckerberg have two dozen back-breaking insults loaded in the chamber at any given moment, it feels a bit less authentic coming from the more mundane, "normal" people in the movie. Sorry, but not everyone in the words has a bottomless bag of quips and biting remarks eternally on hand, and it can strain credibility to present such a world. I have a ton of respect for writers like Sorkin, as they come up with so many genuinely great lines. I just wish they were a bit more economical with them, as the overuse of their witty dialog ends up creating an overly polished sound to the proceedings.

By any standard of a movie in and of itself, The Social Network is great. As a work meant to portray very real, still-living and still-evolving people and events? It can be misleading at best. Either way, it's worth viewing and discussing at least once.