Review: The Social Network (A)

I don't know if I'm always successful, but I can at least tell you that I always try not to be pretentious on this blog, so it probably looks bad that I'm starting this review off with a Biblical quote, but while I watched David Fincher's The Social Network, my mind kept going back to Matthew 16:26, "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Specifically, in one of the movie's most brilliant scenes, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), his eventual billion-dollar idea rapidly growing, approaches Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) in a bar. Erica, in the opening scene, broke up with Mark due to his bluntness and lack of social graces, which a drunk Mark had responded to with a furious, hateful blog post disparaging, among other things, the size of her breasts. Now, Mark is taking Harvard's campus by storm, strangers are stopping him to praise him for it, and he just had an Asian sorority girl go down on him, but none of this means anything to Erica, who still just remembers him as the asshole who humiliated her.

In that same night of drunk-blogging, Mark, with the help of his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, doing Best Supporting Actor work), hacks into several Harvard dorms' databases of resident photos and creates a website in which students are asked to vote on which girl in random pairs is hotter. The firestorm of controversy (and Mark's returning sobriety) compel him to shut down the site, but the astounding amount of hits it got has clearly got his wheels spinning. Soon after, he's approached by WASPy rowing champions Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer, digitally doubled) to help them create a Friendster-esque networking site that can only be accessed by someone with a harvard.edu email address (a none-too-subtle implication that the old-money twins don't want anything that's available to just anybody). Mark gives them the run-around while going to Eduardo with an idea of his own, which would, of course, eventually be Facebook. Eduardo, a business whiz who made a small fortune betting oil futures against the weather, puts up the money and the site becomes the next big thing almost immediately. Furious, the Winklevosses (or "Winklevi", asMark calls them) try to get academic, and then legal action taken against him (scenes of the deposition are intercut with the movie's main narrative). Eduardo, meanwhile, grows uneasy with what he perceives as both the growing rift between him and Mark and Mark's increasing closeness to between-jobs Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, giving a performance so charismatic and charming that we never really hate this thoroughly hateable character). As you might gather, by this point, Facebook is really an incidental element in the movie, a modern Greek tragedy about friendships, betrayals and ambition. Fincher proves his versatility by showing flashes of the spastic, claustrophobic direction of Fight Club and Seven, the relaxed, personal direction of Zodiac and the sprawling, landscape driven-angles of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The acting is all-around brilliant, although the vast majority of the work is done by Eisenberg (who finally sheds the Diet Michael Cera shtick that has colored most of his other performances), Garfield (who has the tricky task of being a British actor playing a Brazilian-American Jew, and gives a furious rant at the very end that proves he's one of the next generation of great actors) and Timberlake, who is just way better than any pop star in a major supporting role has any right to be. And special mention must be made of Trent Reznor's score, perhaps the best use of original music as a separate character since Johnny Greenwood's score for There Will Be Blood. Well-traveled screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, meanwhile, may well be measuring the shelves for his Oscar already. And I know I started this review by saying I'd try not to be pretentious, so it probably hurts my case to close by comparing this movie to The Godfather Part II, but try to watch the movie's brilliant final scene without thinking of Michael Corleone alone in his chair. And now some cheesiness to offset the pretension: Zack Budryk really, really likes this.