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Finally, a movie that you can actually discuss afterwards. And not just on Facebook or Twitter. No, you’ll want to chew it in person, with friends, for hours.
When was the last time this happened?
The film would be “The Social Network”, the highly anticipated collaboration between director David Fincher (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (TV “West Wing”), who has his Friday night at the gala d opening of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. (The film opens wide on October 1.)
The complex drama, about the founding of Facebook and the conflicting claims about who deserved credit for its invention, lives up to the hype. “Social Network” is smart, lively, well done, and – this is the key – raises questions and issues that are both timeless and totally topical.
Oh sure, you probably spent some time arguing after seeing “Inception” this summer, but it was trying to figure out what really happened. How many dream levels were there still? And why were they digging through all that snow towards the end?
In a way, “Social Network” almost seems like a throwback to the great movies of the late 60s and 70s. It draws on the times. This is what is happening now. Right now. And he has a point of view – well, actually a bunch of them.
In the same way that “Bonnie and Clyde”, “Taxi Driver” and “The Godfather” were all provocative films, “Social Network” is too. Like those previous films (but without the torrent of bullets and actual blood), it raises questions about who’s good, what’s right, and what is America’s definition of success.
“Social Network” begins at the end of 2003 with Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), a 19-year-old from Harvard, who is thrown in a noisy bar by his girlfriend (Rooney Mara). He goes back to his dorm, starts drinking, and writes vicious and hurtful things about her on his blog, including revealing her bra size. Classy guy.
Immediately afterwards, on a tear, he hacked into Harvard’s computer system and created a site called Facemash. It features the faces of two college girls side by side, and viewers are invited to rate which one is the hottest. Within hours, the site received over 20,000 hits and crashed the Harvard server.
It’s Revenge of the Nerds, in short. Soon it becomes Revenge of the Nerds, basically.
Socially inept but still the smartest guy in the room, Zuckerberg continues to conceive of the idea for Facebook, the now global social network that made him the world’s youngest billionaire.
Or does he do it? Because success has many fathers while failure is orphaned, there are competing claims for the founding of Facebook. While no one claims that it was Zuckerberg’s brain and programming skills that built the system, he then faced legal challenges from other Harvards who claimed they too had been there at the birth of the social network.
These competing claims, both in the drop-room and in the flashback, form the heart of the film. One is from Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), another geek and Zuckerberg’s self-proclaimed best friend, who provides the seed capital for Facebook. The second lawsuit is filed by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, twins who are everything Zuckerberg and Saverin are not: socially skilled, preppy, and successful athletes. (They crewed at Harvard and later at the Olympics.)
The Winklevoss twins claim that Zuckerberg scammed them after the Facemash incident, they approached him to design a dating site that would trade on the Harvard name. Instead, he donned them, even as he frantically built Facebook.
Basically, Zuckerberg, as written and described here, is a brilliant jerk. He is so motivated by his vision that it trumps any social or ethical consideration. He creates the world’s most successful friend finder, but finds himself friendless, just like he started out.
There is something very American about all of this. Who owns an idea? Does the person have it first? The person who runs the furthest with it? The person who finances the dream rather than the dreamer? And what is the cost of success?
These questions are timeless. The news that “social network” is also raising concerns the Internet and the speed at which it can disseminate information, both true and false. As the ex-girlfriend Zuckerberg so viciously denounces in her first blog post, later tells her when he belatedly tries to apologize, “The Internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark. It’s written in ink.
What I love most about the film is that, without ever articulating them out loud, it raises all these questions about innovation, ownership of ideas, capitalism, friendship, loyalty and reach and reach of the Internet. They’re right there, existing almost like invisible subtitles in a viewer’s mind.
Better yet, “Social Network” does not provide easy answers to any of the questions it raises. Let the discussions begin.
(This review first appeared in conjunction with the New York Film Festival.)
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