The Social Network (12A.)
Directed by David Fincher.
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Rooney Mara. 120 mins.
If I might be so presumptuous, I'm going to guess that your reaction to the prospect of a film about the creation of Facebook by Harvard college kids and its ugly multi-million dollar lawsuit fallout will be – what's in it for me? Sure, it's an "interesting" subject, one that might catch your eye if it were an article in a Sunday supplement magazine but is it a full-on, two hour, motion picture experience?
West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin and Fight Club director David Fincher say yes. A juggernaut of almost oppressive critical acclaim says yes. I’m left wondering if Facebook has so enfeebled people’s brains that they slaver approval at the mere mention of it.
On top of its determinedly dull subject, the film also blends three of cinema’s most tedious genres – the courtroom drama, the genius-invents drama and the based-on-a-true-story drama.
The framing device is a pre-court deposition hearing in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Eisenberg) is responding to lawsuits filed by three Harvard students who claim he stole their idea, and separately by his former business partner Eduardo Saverin (Garfield) who supplied the original start-up money and then got shafted out of his share of the company. The rest of the film is told in flashbacks starting with one of the most abrasive and unappealing opening scenes ever, in which Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend (Mara) in an alienating barrage of clever-clever dialogue.
Because all the people who are suing each other have different versions of what happened, Sorkin reckons this is some kind of computer geek Rashomon. I can’t see how. The protagonists squabble over what really happened but the film only gives us one version of events and it makes fairly clear judgements about what was done and who was wrong.
No Fincher film is ever less than immaculately turned out and The Social Network has three top-notch lead performances from Eisenberg, Garfield and Timberlake, who turns up as the playboy creator of music-sharing site Napster. (Ah, Napster, happy memories.) What really impresses is how the film manages to get away with such fantastically unsympathetic representations of living contemporary figures. Everybody in this film is an absolute pig, with the possible exception of Saverin who is just a bit of a sap.
What happened to David Fincher? He ascended in the 90s to the ranks of the directorial elite and was hailed as an exacting perfectionist of Kubrickian obsessiveness (we are told 80 takes were required for some scenes here.) He has spent this century making meticulously crafted, largely uninteresting films - Panic Room, Benjamin Button. Granted Zodiac was a tremendous film but even that was oddly inessential – if I had to wipe some memories from my hard drive I could sacrifice that.
The man who once made Fight Club is now revealing that the creator of Facebook was a shallow, immoral, sarcastic, arrogant, graceless nerd and that the overnight creation of a billion-dollar business caused people to fall out. His next film is the remake of Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – my guess is that the butler did it.
Directed by David Fincher.
Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer, Rooney Mara. 120 mins.
If I might be so presumptuous, I'm going to guess that your reaction to the prospect of a film about the creation of Facebook by Harvard college kids and its ugly multi-million dollar lawsuit fallout will be – what's in it for me? Sure, it's an "interesting" subject, one that might catch your eye if it were an article in a Sunday supplement magazine but is it a full-on, two hour, motion picture experience?
West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin and Fight Club director David Fincher say yes. A juggernaut of almost oppressive critical acclaim says yes. I’m left wondering if Facebook has so enfeebled people’s brains that they slaver approval at the mere mention of it.
On top of its determinedly dull subject, the film also blends three of cinema’s most tedious genres – the courtroom drama, the genius-invents drama and the based-on-a-true-story drama.
The framing device is a pre-court deposition hearing in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Eisenberg) is responding to lawsuits filed by three Harvard students who claim he stole their idea, and separately by his former business partner Eduardo Saverin (Garfield) who supplied the original start-up money and then got shafted out of his share of the company. The rest of the film is told in flashbacks starting with one of the most abrasive and unappealing opening scenes ever, in which Zuckerberg is dumped by his girlfriend (Mara) in an alienating barrage of clever-clever dialogue.
Because all the people who are suing each other have different versions of what happened, Sorkin reckons this is some kind of computer geek Rashomon. I can’t see how. The protagonists squabble over what really happened but the film only gives us one version of events and it makes fairly clear judgements about what was done and who was wrong.
No Fincher film is ever less than immaculately turned out and The Social Network has three top-notch lead performances from Eisenberg, Garfield and Timberlake, who turns up as the playboy creator of music-sharing site Napster. (Ah, Napster, happy memories.) What really impresses is how the film manages to get away with such fantastically unsympathetic representations of living contemporary figures. Everybody in this film is an absolute pig, with the possible exception of Saverin who is just a bit of a sap.
What happened to David Fincher? He ascended in the 90s to the ranks of the directorial elite and was hailed as an exacting perfectionist of Kubrickian obsessiveness (we are told 80 takes were required for some scenes here.) He has spent this century making meticulously crafted, largely uninteresting films - Panic Room, Benjamin Button. Granted Zodiac was a tremendous film but even that was oddly inessential – if I had to wipe some memories from my hard drive I could sacrifice that.
The man who once made Fight Club is now revealing that the creator of Facebook was a shallow, immoral, sarcastic, arrogant, graceless nerd and that the overnight creation of a billion-dollar business caused people to fall out. His next film is the remake of Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – my guess is that the butler did it.
