I Finally Saw the Facebook Movie This Weekend
When I first heard about the project it was before I was a heavy user of facebook myself and I thought that the prospect of any sort of film about the company’s history sounded incredibly uninteresting. Then I became (and still am) an obsessive user of facebook and as I heard the unending number of entertainment news stories about the project I still thought it sounded like a boring idea for a movie. While I thought (and still think) that a movie that somehow explored the facebook phenomenon could be great it seemed to me that a film that merely explored the business and legal disputes involved in the founding and explosion into hyper-profitability of facebook as a corporate entity sounded at best like fodder for maybe a couple mildly interesting articles in the business section. So, it’s a great credit to the (generally wildly over-hyped) writing ability of Aaron Sorkin that he was able to craft any sort of engaging narrative out of a not-innately-that-interesting business/tech story.
The other thing that struck me as strange when I first heard about the project was that it seemed like a really odd combination of writer and director. One the one hand you’ve got Aaron Sorkin and his fast-paced (I’m assuming generally described as a “rat-a-tat”) dialogue between self-satisfied supersmart liberals (and generally beloved by self-satisfied liberals of all kinds). On the other you’ve got David Fincher who’s generally at his best when he’s creating some sort of grimy, alien world (and dealing with themes of alienation). It turns out that Sorkin was the ideal choice to write the script. His love of having rich, educated people argue over power and money is perfectly suited to the material and I can’t imagine anyone else going through all these depositions and middling business books/articles and getting anything this engaging out of it. Fincher didn’t really come off all auteurist in this piece though and in fact, other than Trent Reznor’s score throughout, much of the movie didn’t really bear his stamp. The only truly Fincheresque sequence was the justly praised rowing scene, in which style and music were deployed to maximum effect to show the absurdity of these type of atavistic elite college rituals, which I know a little about.
But ultimately with all the insane hype about how great this movie was, and with all the talk about how zeitgeist-capturing it was and everything, a small part of me was hoping it would be a total world-defining film like Fight Club. Like maybe it would after all be a Fincheresque examination of the creepiness of social networking sites or of Harvard or whatever, and some of the early scenes - which showed the earlier, darker incarnations of the facebook/facesmash/facebook and the competitiveness, hedonism and brutal social order of fancypants college were kind of like that. However, pretty much the minute the action left Harvard and permanently stopped flashing back to it, the film became simply the story of an ultimately fairly straightforward business dispute; entertainingly told, brilliantly acted, with great dialogue (which is probably generally described as let’s say “crackling” this time) but ultimately no deeper or more timely than Pirates of Silicon Valley.
This makes it sound like I liked the movie a lot less than I did. In fact, I kind of fucking loved it. But I was predisposed to like it. I’ve been a huge fan of Jessie Eisenberg from the beginning of his career and I love how Tobias Funke-like he now gets to taste these meaty leading man parts right in his mouth! Also, I like Justin Timberlake as an actor. Some of the best one-liners, put-downs etc. are still going through my head days later and generally the style and feel of the film has stayed with me a lot more than has that of other hyped films of the moment I’ve seen such as the ridiculous Black Swan or the beautifully made, noble, but ultimately completely unoriginal True Grit. I liked The Social Network and even loved parts of it, but ultimately I just didn’t think it was the era-defining masterpiece it was hyped as, mostly because it was focused more on facebook as a corporation and not as a phenomenon.
