"The Social Network" - REVIEW

Last night I was lucky enough to attend an early screening of the increasingly buzzed-about The Social Network, aka "that Facebook movie with the weird trailer." Writer Aaron Sorkin and actor Armie Hammer (who plays a pair of WASPy twins) were in attendance for a Q&A session after, which I'll touch on briefly in the review, which only adds to the excitement. Considering its recent gain in awards potential buzz, I was particularly excited to see what David Fincher and crew had to offer, and they certainly don't disappoint.

It would (and a few months ago, was) be easy enough to dismiss a project like The Social Network as a sign that Hollywood has run out of ideas, and is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. After all, how interesting could the founding of a damn social networking site be? Some code gets strung together, and BAM, popular website, right? Not exactly. Quite a bit of drama went down in the founding of the massively popular site, and director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin have done a very good job of putting the story (from Ben Mezrich's novel "The Accidental Billionaires") on screen in a very compelling manner.

Perhaps the best decision that Sorkin made in his screenplay was to keep the film from siding with any of the three main angles involved (Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, and the Winklevoss twins). In taking various scenes that happened according to the three wildly differing depositions, he's turned it into a sort of Rashomon-style story, only you only see everything once, and never know whose point of view it's from. While this does have some slight drawbacks (you don't really "feel" for someone even when they get screwed), the decision overall is a success. Zuckerberg could easily been an easy villain/anti-hero, yet the final scene seems to tell us to hold off on making a final judgement. Another small issue is that, given Sorkin's love of (rapid-fire) dialogue over story (his words, not mine), at times the characters all feel less like fully-developed people, and more like extensions of Aaron Sorkin (to make an unnecessary Inception reference, these would be the different sides of his subconscious populating his dream world). As such, it's also not much of an actors piece, despite solid work across the board from its young and capable cast. Eisenberg is conniving and hard-to-read, Garfield is sympathetic, and Armie Hammer and Max Minghella are suitably flustered as Zuckerberg's first enemies. Roles played by Rooney Mara (our new Lisbeth Salander), Rashida Jones, Justin Timberlake, and Brenda Song are all solid, but without enough to make them terribly memorable.

But the issues pretty much stop there. Even though I'm not sure I'd call this Fincher's strongest effort as a director, this is a very good film that perhaps owes more to its screenplay. Sorkin's rapid-fire exchanges really suit the material and setting here, all very smart Harvard students, computer programmers, and lawyers for whom such off-the-cuff cleverness seems plausible, and as a result, is highly entertaining. And even with the above-mentioned love of dialogue, Sorkin has still crafted an immensely engaging and compelling story. Helping him along are the film's second and third strongest assets: the editing and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score. The two together bring an incredible sense of life to a bunch of conversations of computer code, blogging, web design, and legal questions, pushing the film's tone at points to pseudo-thriller (and I mean that as a high compliment). Even a scene of Andrew Garfield's Eduardo Saverin looking at an envelope on his floor is made compelling simply by the placement of the pulsating music. The film runs two hours, yet when I realized that I was at the final scene, all I could think was, "but wait, please tell me there's more to see."

So while its characters may not exactly "pop" or feel like full-on, flesh-and-blood people, they certainly aren't one-note caricatures; they're simply part of the Aaron Sorkin universe. And with David Fincher at the helm, directing such a solid ensemble of young talent, it's hard to say that this is a bad thing. This is a well-acted, excellently crafted, and occasionally very funny film that does a great job of telling a story that most people probably wouldn't want care about on the surface. A Facebook status message might be shallow, and hell, the whole site might be completely vacuous, but the story behind it is certainly not. This is so much more than just "a dumb Facebook movie."

Grade: A-/A