- UK release: October 2010
- Director: David Fincher · Writer: Aaron Sorkin
- Studio / distributor: Columbia Pictures; Relativity Media; Trigger Street Productions
- Genre: Biographical drama / technology and business drama · Runtime: 120 minutes (BBFC 15)
- Main cast: Jesse Eisenberg (Zombieland, The Squid and the Whale) as Mark Zuckerberg; Andrew Garfield (Never Let Me Go) as Eduardo Saverin; Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker; Armie Hammer as Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss; Rooney Mara as Erica Albright
- Rotten Tomatoes: 96% critics / 86% audience · My rating: 6 / 10
A film about a website made by a man who, by his own admission, had to learn cinema for the camera to forgive him. David Fincher comes to The Social Network off Zodiac, a procedural so patient it tested the audience as much as its detectives, and the surprise is how fast this one moves by comparison. Aaron Sorkin wrote it from Ben Mezrich’s book about the founding of Facebook, which means a screenplay built almost entirely out of people talking very quickly in rooms. The pitch sounds inert: a lawsuit about a social network is not obvious cinema. What Fincher and Sorkin have made of it is far slicker than the premise has any right to be, and I admire it more than I warm to it.
The setup
Harvard, 2003. Mark Zuckerberg, a sophomore with a talent for code and a gift for alienating everyone in range, gets dumped, retaliates online in a way that humiliates the women of the university, and in the fallout starts building the thing that becomes Facebook. He does it with money and faith from his closest friend Eduardo Saverin, with a design idea he may or may not have taken from the well-connected Winklevoss twins, and later with the seductive guidance of Napster’s Sean Parker. The film tells this through the depositions of two lawsuits that come afterwards, cutting between the building and the unbuilding of every relationship in it. The structure is the cleverest thing about it, letting you watch a friendship and a betrayal land in the same scene.
The cast
Jesse Eisenberg is the engine. His Zuckerberg is all clipped delivery and unblinking certainty, a young man so quick that he treats conversation as a contest he has already won, and Eisenberg keeps him just sympathetic enough that you cannot fully write him off. After the jittery comic energy of Zombieland it is a controlled, chilly turn. Andrew Garfield, fresh from the quiet devastation of Never Let Me Go, gives Eduardo the wounded decency the film needs at its centre, the one person whose hurt you feel rather than observe. Justin Timberlake is a genuine surprise as Sean Parker, all charm and paranoia, selling the Silicon Valley swagger that turns Zuckerberg’s head. Armie Hammer, playing both Winklevoss twins through some seamless trickery, makes privilege funny without making it cartoonish. Rooney Mara has only a couple of scenes as Erica Albright, but the opening exchange sets the whole emotional temperature.
The craft
Fincher’s control is total, which is both the appeal and, for me, part of the problem. Jeff Cronenweth shoots Harvard in burnished autumn browns and the offices in cold blues, and the famous rowing sequence at Henley is staged with an operatic precision that has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with showing off, in the best way. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provide a score of low electronic dread that does more emotional work than the dialogue admits, turning a coding montage into something that hums with menace. The editing is razored, scenes overlapping across timelines without ever losing you. It is, on a technical level, close to flawless. The trouble is that all this craft is in service of watching unpleasant clever people be unpleasant and clever at each other, and a beautifully made film about that is still a film about that.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Fincher’s own Zodiac, another true-story procedural about obsession, and the gap is instructive: Zodiac earns its coldness because the thing it is chasing genuinely matters, while here the stakes are equity percentages and hurt feelings dressed as litigation. Sorkin’s machine-gun dialogue is the same instrument he sharpened on A Few Good Men, and the deposition scenes have that courtroom snap. As a business origin story it is sleeker than most, though it shares the modern tech-drama habit of asking you to find the boardroom thrilling on the strength of editing alone.
Critics versus the rest of us
I am well aware that I am on the wrong side of the room here. The critics are at 96%, near unanimous, calling it the defining film of the digital age and the year’s best. Audiences are a notch cooler at 86%, which is still a landslide. The praise for the script, the editing and the score is entirely fair, and I would not argue a word of it on craft. My own reaction is plainer: I found it impressive and a little airless, a film I respected scene by scene without ever wanting to be back inside it. When a story is this in love with the cleverness of its own unlikeable lead, admiration is not the same as engagement.
Verdict
This is a film I would recommend without hesitation and rewatch with reluctance. The writing is genuinely first rate, Eisenberg is excellent, Fincher does not waste a frame, and as a piece of construction it is one of the slicker dramas of the year. None of that translates, for me, into the thing I value most, the pull to return to it. I admire the building and feel nothing much about the people in it, and that ceiling is personal rather than a fault in the work. Brilliant, chilly, and not for me at full marks. 6⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, with DVD and Blu-ray to follow in the new year.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the film went on to win three Oscars, for Sorkin’s adapted screenplay, the Reznor and Ross score, and the editing, and it has settled into its reputation as one of the defining dramas of its decade. Fincher and Reznor and Ross reunited soon after for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It is now widely available on disc and digital, and streams on the major platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 15 by the BBFC for infrequent strong language and drug use. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Language: There is infrequent use of strong language (‘f**k’) and milder terms including ‘bitch’, ‘shit’ and ‘asshole’.
Drugs: During party scenes there is some undetailed cannabis use and a brief sequence implying that characters are snorting cocaine. The police then arrive and the users are arrested, and the work as a whole does not promote or endorse drugs misuse.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
