THE SOCIAL NETWORK (Fincher 2010) 6/10

Aaron Sorkin can’t handle the truth. Or at least, the scriptwriter can’t handle Ben Mezrich’s account of the truth behind the setting up of the world’s biggest website, Facebook, as chronicled in his book The Accidental Billionaires – which Sorkin has now somewhat stiltedly adapted for the screen as The Social Network.

The “structure” of the screenplay, such as it is, involves Facebook’s main founder, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) participating in parallel, separate legal hearings in which he’s being sued by (a) his former best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), and (b) his sometime associates, identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both played by a droll if – ironically, given the circumstances – rather one-dimensional Armie Hammer).

The cases are somewhat different in character, but boil down to each set of plaintiffs reckoning that Zuckerberg has feathered his own nest at their expense. So what we get is, in effect, a series of extended flashbacks to the four principals’ time as Harvard students, when Facebook was devised – semi-accidentally – after Zuckerberg was dumped, in the film’s opening scene, by his girlfriend ‘Erica Albright’ (Rooney Mara.) Indeed, it’s perhaps surprising that ‘Albright’ – unlike Saverin and the Winklevosses (aka ‘the Winklevi’) – didn’t seek some portion of the Facebook megabucks, as her actions towards Zuckerberg are, at two pivotal junctures, crucial to Facebook’s inception and development.

Then again, two legal proceedings are quite enough for a movie which for long stretches is a dismaying boilerplate succession of extended, illustrated, he-said-she-said disagreements mediated by old-hand legal-eagles played by old-hand character-actors David Selby and John Getz. But despite the odd line of dialogue here and there about how statements in legal cases often rely on exaggeration and misrepresentation, there’s no indication that what we’re seeing is anything other than what might have happened, rather than a visualisation of one side or the other’s perspectives. This is certainly not Rashomon.

Indeed, The Social Network is, despite its choppy time-hops, a dismayingly straightforward affair from a director – David Fincher – who’s been able to make something gleamingly gold-like from unpromisingly base materials (Panic Room). Here he seems to be on very best, safe-hands behaviour, reverently treating Sorkin’s smart-alecky, near-incessant, rat-a-tat dialogue (in which sarcasm seems to be the only form of wit) like it’s Pinter or Mamet – or, a closer parallel in terms of insider/outsider, twentyish, over-educated rich/brainy folk, Whit Stillman.

The only really ‘Fincheresque’ sequence is a refreshingly flashy – but ultimately quite superfluous – scene at the Henley Royal Regatta on the Thames, where Harvard lose to Dutch rivals by an “excruciatingly” close margin. This sequence also features a minor howler from Sorkin – much-praised for his TV work on The West Wing – in which a British man refers to his daughter, a student at a British university, as “majoring in French.”  The film is dotted with similarly weak or sloppy little touches ; characters are forever bursting into others’ rooms to announce key plot-points in loud voices; various types of clichés abound; it’s always easy to distinguish drawn-from-life characters from the composites with whom they occasionally interact.

These are forgivable lapses in a movie which has just enough entertaining scenes – many of them involving a just-gay-enough Justin Timberlake, well-cast as flashy Napster creator Sean Parker – to remain pretty watchable over the course of its two hours, but which never really comes into focus either in terms of its drama, its characters, or overall raison d’être. Of course, given Facebook’s remarkable ubiquity and popularity, any competently made movie on this subject is guaranteed a large audience – especially one which has been so over-hyped and over-praised by so many American critics (to the point that it’s being seriously spoken of as a Best Picture Oscar front-runner.)

But surely, given the calibre of talent involved on both sides of the camera (Garfield scores as the most recognisably human of the main characters; Dakota Johnson works wonders with little more than a bit-part), we should be able to expect more than a ploddingly pedestrian amble through a tale that could have been used to say much about 21st century society (privacy, connectivity, etc), but which seems likely to date about as quickly as Facebook’s current blue-and-white font.

Surprisingly, Fincher and Sorkin don’t themselves seem to have that much to say about a website which frequently reduces opinions to polarised LIKE / DON’T LIKE options. And so their film’s cumulative impact, at least for that stubbornly naysaying/Luddite minority still immune to Facebook’s seemingly irresistible appeal, may well be an underwhelmed DON’T CARE.

Neil Young
10th October, 2010

THE SOCIAL NETWORK
[6/10] : US 2010 : David FINCHER : 120m
seen 10/Oct/10 at Empire, Sunderland (£6.20) : 15/28