The Social Network – Pride Goeth Before the Billions [Movie Reviews]

The Good: A well-paced plot filled with the right mix of intrigue and humor. Competent and believable acting by the entirety of the cast. Sympathetic portrayals the controversial characters (which is to say, all of them). Eisenberg’s occasional flashes of high-functioning-nerdtastic rants. Trent Reznor does the music.

The Bad: Loses a little bit of its funny perspective toward the end. Has the potential to be devastatingly uninteresting to people who don’t remember college that way or have no interest in the emergence of social media.

The Bottom Line: It’s Shakespeare, but instead of kingdoms and starcrosssed love, it’s about billion-dollar enterprises and repressed social anxiety. Also, you get to watch programmers drunk-code. Cool.

In the Elizabethan era, audiences could experience the schadenfreude of watching proud protagonists lose something valuable through Shakespearean epics like King Lear. In the 70’s, our parents’ generation could see the dramatization of real-life political power plays in movies like All the President’s Men. Our generation has The Social Network, a movie about the overlap between ambition and voyeurism, the success it brings one socially awkward youth, and the personal loss that allegedly follows.

Coming off telling the modern-fantasy adaptation, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, director David Fincher brings his unique-narrative-format touch to the story of young billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and co-founder of Facebook. Screenwriter Alan Sorkin also flexes the interpersonal-relationships-amid-real-scenarios muscle that he sharpened as head writer on The West Wing.

The effect is a story that college students like myself will follow by recognizing the almost-insultingly simplistic formula with which Facebook snatched us up in the mid-2000s. Older audiences will either appreciate the archetypal story of greed, ambition, and betrayal or be lost in the apparently self-indulgent story of an uppity nerd who launched a website fairly recently.

 

Spoiler: Turns out Mark Zuckerberg was just a figment of Eduardo's imagination.

I have to admit, I balked at the idea of The Social Network when I saw the trailer. I mean, seriously. A movie about Facebook? How blatantly 18-to-35-demographic could Hollywood get? As entertaining as the trailer was, I assumed the worst in my interest and staved off TSN for as long as possible, even after the reviews came in hailing it as a pretty smart movie.

While the idea was probably greenlit because of its built-in audience, Fincher and Sorkin rarely take the concept for granted. The Social Network is entertaining on its own merits. You could swap out Facebook for Twitter, Foursquare, or a fictional website and still have a snappy script centered around relatable characters.

The dramatization, based on this book, follows Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, Scott Pilg–er, I mean Nick and Nor….wait…Zombieland. He was the kid in Zombieland.) from his undergraduate days in Harvard, where a blindsiding breakup leads him to create a girl-rating website that generates unprecedented traffic on the university’s servers. This gets the attention of smarmy Ivy-League-douchebags the Winklevoss twins and their token minority patsy, Divya, who want to enlist Zuckerberg’s coding genius to create a Harvard dating site.

Mark initially accepts, but stalls on the Winklevoss project in favor of creating thefacebook.com with the help of his only friend (and his only friend’s start-up money), Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). As most of us know, Facebook makes it big, which attracts the litigious ire of the privleged “Winklevi” as well as the attentions of infamous Napster founder, Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake). Sean and Eduardo have different visions for the future of the company, with Mark’s ultimate decision leading to the legal deposition we see him in throughout the movie.

 

Then, Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up to punch Mark Z., I shit you not.

I rag on Jesse Eisenberg a lot for taking the Michael Cera typecast and somehow making it more generic, but his aloof-nerd approach fits the character of Zuckerberg pretty damn well in this flick. Garfield and Timberlake are each convincing in their own roles, avoiding moral absolutism when judging the film’s characters. There is clearly a bias here originating from the book, but you can understand every individual’s perspective.

The movie’s main selling point is the humor. Ivy League kids are just wittier than the standard frat-movie-du-jour, it seems. We’re constantly reminded that these characters are just kids, getting patronized by their elders and participating in traditional rituals of fitting in, like carrying a chicken around all day. The characters rarely stray into melodramatic or implausibly-grandiose territory. When they get angry, it’s for damn good reasons, making the escalating tension among the characters more palpable.

Zuckerberg is not portrayed as a moustche-twirling villain, though given some of his on-the-record comments, he might actually be more of an asshole than TSN implies. Instead, the movie portrays him as a lonely and isolated genius, compensating for his social idiocy by applying his savant knowledge of the Internet for profit. The real antagonist in this movie is Pride, which is essentially embodied in Timberlake’s character halfway through. But even Sean Parker’s actions are at times understandable from a business perspective, which makes the ultimate conflict that much more tragic. No one is clearly wrong or right in this morality play — there’s just enough money at stake to make any 20-something’s head spin on its moral axis.

The last twenty minutes or so suffer from back-to-back dramatic scene fatigue, but the movie thankfully wraps up rather than dragging its epilogue too far and we are left with a particularly poignant image as the pre-credit “true facts” appear on the screen.

Babewatch

Whatever eye candy this film has is primarily for the ladies. Defying standard college-film convention, there isn’t much focus on Zuckerberg’s sex life. Of course, girls will squee at JT and overlook the fact that he’s essentially a hedonist playboy. But straight females will probably also gravitate toward Andrew Garfield’s character, because, I freely admit, the dude is easy on the eyes.

And if they’re into curly-headed, rodent-type creatures, well, there’s Jesse Eisenberg.

And despair not, XX-chromosome-seeking babewatchers. That girl from the Suite Life of Zack and Cody has a few scenes in this film and she’s cute, despite being a batshit-crazy pyro.

 

Uh…don’t do that?

Rashida Jones (The Office, I Love You Man) also has a supporting role.

Ultimately, I could see how The Social Network can be seen as a premature and masturbatory ode to our petty, Facebook-obsessed society. If you don’t give a damn about social networks or the politics of starting a Dotcom with your friends, this movie could seem as irrelevant to you as a blog post detailing Hannah Montana’s bowel movements (Hannah Montana’s still a thing, right?).

But, then again, several critics have taken a liking to it and I think that’s because TSN tells a larger story than its parts. We’re all familiar with stories where hubris leads to a character’s destruction, but what about a loss that is more intangible than death or poverty? We all know Zuckerberg makes it out of these events filthy rich. The interesting question is what he loses in the process or whether he really had anything substantial at all.

There are a lot of contrived motivations which I think are clearly extrapolations for the movie, but at its core, The Social Network is a character study of an outsider whose attempts to connect with society elevate him above his peers. But, as far as character arcs go, you’re left wondering if he really gained anything, since it can be as lonely at the top as it is at the bottom.

To the point: It’s a good movie and funny too, though the subject matter limits its ability to be mind-blowing. It also serves as a relevant cautionary tale for this modern era where our desperate attempts to validate social standing may be leaving us stranded on our digital islands.

YEAH, BUT I'M RICH, BITCH!

The Social Network gets EIGHT out of TEN lawsuits from your best friends.