The Social Network

Directed by David Fincher

(R)

****

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Director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin have unexpectedly turned the story of Facebook into “the movie of the year,” said Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. In training their sights on founder Mark Zuckerberg and the betrayals that accompanied the genesis of his 500-million-user-strong website, Fincher and Sorkin have gone beyond rote fictionalization of a 21st-century business saga to capture the lonely-crowd zeitgeist of our Internet age. Zuckerberg, who’s now 26 and worth as many billions as he has years, comes off badly. That’s what happens when you cut multiple friends and business partners out of what they consider to be their share of the next great big idea. But this is also a film about all of us—one that reveals “the nation of narcissists we’ve become” since signing on to social networking as a way of life.

The film succeeds as “a classic study in ego, greed, and the slippery nature of American enterprise,” said Justin Chang in Variety. It’s often hard to tell who backstabbed whom. Told from multiple perspectives, the film, like Facebook itself, leaves it to the audience to decide which point of view can be trusted. Jesse Eisenberg’s pitch-perfect performance as Zuckerberg renders the Harvard dropout as a “shifty-eyed creep” who, even so, is “not entirely without conscience.” Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin, who was the closest thing Zuckerberg had to a true college friend, provides a “strong moral counterweight,” even if you’re never entirely convinced that he was as wronged by Zuckerberg as he claims. Fincher’s direction “is a model of coherence and discipline,” while Sorkin provides “meaty characterizations” and an all-around “feast of great talk.”

Much debate about the film has focused on the relative accuracy of its portrait of Zuckerberg, said David Denby in The New Yorker. But to focus on the movie’s biographical merits is to miss the larger message of a true “work of art.” As Zuckerberg morphs from awkward Harvard sophomore into Silicon Valley’s version of Citizen Kane, the filmmakers implicate us all in his empty triumph. Driven to resolve the disconnect between his inflated self-image and his lowly place in the established social order, Zuckerberg built a new order with a website that “celebrates the aura of intimacy while providing the relief of distance.” The “worldwide social revolution” we’re all participating in might be merely the full flowering of one college nerd’s urgent desire to meet girls “without having to endure the humiliation of campus mixers.”