There was a point, only a short time distance into “The Social Network,” that I realized the effect that Aaron Sorkin’s writing has on a film. Sorkin’s dialogue, like that of David Mamet or old-time Hollywood screenwriting great Herman J. Mankiewicz, snaps and crackles and seizes center-stage by sprinting forward with the audience’s attention and intellect trailing in a frisky headlock. Sorkin, like Mamet and like Mankiewicz, forces an extra burden of discipline and focus on actors. The importance of delivering Sorkin’s lines exactly to the letter, with the exactly intended emotional shading, and at exactly the right time is essential and it transforms acting into something more along the lines of musical performance or choreographed dancing. However, Sorkin-style dialogue also frees the director to be more ambitious with the films visual elements and mood-setting. “The Social Network” is a great demonstration of the Sorkin effect.
I don’t know that there exists an American film that better captures the animating energies of the business entrepreneur, or of capitalist competition more generally. “The Social Network” maintains a fairly tight focus on the Mark Zuckerberg character and illustrates well “the stuff” that allows him to become the inventor of Facebook rather than just another Harvard alum. Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse Eisenberg, doesn’t fit in at Harvard. He doesn’t fit in socially, of course, but he also doesn’t fit in because of his out-sized self-confidence and ambition. Zuckerberg’s apparent self-confidence and sense of his own agency are so great that, for him, Harvard immediately seems to be several sizes too small. On a campus full of future world-beaters, the Zuckerberg we encounter in the film knows that he already has the world down on the canvas — he’s just looking for a championship belt to hold in the air.
Zuckerberg, too, is riven with a desire for friends, social status, and belonging. His social envy fuels his Napoleonic campaign to create and launch Facebook, his Machiavellian willingness to remove anyone who might get in his way, and to see its gigantic potential upside more clearly than anyone else. “The Social Network” skillfully leaves us with a crystal clear answer to the question of why Facebook exists today: because Mark Zuckerberg wanted more friends.
The actor who plays Mark Zuckerberg, the up-and-coming Jesse Eisenberg, does fabulous job with Sorkin’s script and is a likely Oscar nominee. My only criticism is that we don’t get much in the way of the internal exposure that is only possible with screen acting, but its possible that is more a function of the director’s editing decisions more than anything else. Also, having seen Eisenberg in “The Squid and the Whale” and “Solitary Man,” the Zuckerberg role did not really force him to expand his range or go outside of his acting comfort zone.
Also, deserving of praise is Justin Timberlake who does a phenomenal job with the character of Sean Parker, the inventor of Napster. Timberlake’s Parker is a wise veteran of the dotcom game turned confidence man and is the perfect people-savvy counterweight to Eisenberg’s idiot savant Zuckerberg. Timberlake steals scene after scene, and is key to giving the film an epic dimension and credibility as more than just another computer nerd tale.
Director David Fincher does exceptionally well at creating a Harvard College that, if it lacks realism makes up for it with vivid and evocative rendering of place and time. Fincher’s greatest achievement, though, is in framing Zuckerberg — who through Fincher’s camera and editing exists comfortably as a blend of obnoxious social outcast, charismatic geek rebel, and man-child tycoon.
