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Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg bring the making of Facebook to life in Fincher's mdoern American classic |
Its October 2003 and a 19-year old Harvard student Mark
Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) gets dumped by his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara).
So, he responds like many people today would – but not in 2003 – by writing a
series of rude and angry blogs about her. And at the same time, he does
something you and I wouldn’t be able to do – he builds overnight a campus
website called Facemash that allows users to rate the attractiveness of female
students. It’s a sensation – and a scandal.
Off the back of it, Zuckerberg is approached by the
Winklevoss brothers (in a skilled double performance by Armie Hammer) to see if
he’d be interested in building an elite social network, Harvard Connection, for
them. Zuckerberg agrees – but did he independently already have the idea for
Thefacebook, an elite social network for Ivy League students? Either way, with
funds from friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) he builds the platform
which is to become Facebook. Does it all end well? Since the story is framed
around Zuckerberg in 2009, sitting in depositions while being sued by both the
Winkelvoss brothers (“the Winklevi”) and Saverin, you can guess not.
Fincher’s film reflects its central character in many ways –
cool, efficient, tightly wound, juggling intellectualism with simmering
tension. It’s vibrant, fresh, razor-sharp, perfectly paced and superbly
dramatic. It turns what could have been a terrifically dull story of very
clever people typing lines of code into a whipper-sharp story of jealousies,
rivalries and suspicions. It also brilliantly veers away from being a polemic.
It could easily have made points – as many films have – about the “evils and
dangers of that creepy thing the internet” or constantly reminded us how
morally superior film-makers are to social media kingpins. It does nothing of
the sort. Instead it’s a brilliantly insightful look at the birth of a
phenomenon that also makes subtle, intelligent points about some of the
behaviours that phenomenon led to. All while keeping us gloriously entertained.
A big part of the film’s success is in Sorkin’s superb script.
The material is perfect for him. The character’s intellectualism fits with his
pithy turn of phrase, while their perceptions of themselves as victims or on a
moral crusade fits with his ability to write morality with empathy. It also
helps that he is the master of crackling dialogue. The idea to structure the
film around the depositions is also a master-stroke. Not just a reminder of
what’s to come, it adds an air of artificiality to everything we see (perfect
as well for Sorkin’s smarter-than-life dialogue) – after all, each scene is
based on the filtered remembrances of people in the depositions. And all of
them remember a subtly different story.
Sorkin and Fincher also manage to avoid having villains in
play. It would be easy to make Zuckerberg a villain: many films would have
done. But Zuckerberg here isn’t bad – it’s more that he’s tunnel-visioned,
selfish and socially inept. Erica (a marvellous turn by Rooney Mara as the
first victim of social media bullying) has a point when she says she dumping
him not because he’s a geek but because he’s not really a nice person. But
Zuckerberg’s actions – his betrayals as some read them – come not from
vindictiveness but a shark-like moving forward that leaves people behind him.
And he’s also, as the film is keen to show repeatedly, lonely. He has one
friend – whom he sacrifices on the altar of his creation – and is ruthless at
cutting people out of his life when they fail to meet the standards he has set
them.
The film channels the skills of Eisenberg – whose range is
not huge – perfectly here, in a role he was surely born to play. Eisenberg
crafts his physicality in something hunched, oppressed and sullen while his
flat voice is perfect for a man who expresses himself through his creation not
his personality. He gives Zuckerberg both a ruthlessness, but also a strange
lack of knowledge – constantly surprised that his actions have consequences that
leave him alone. He makes him a true lonely god of the internet – the man who
invented the biggest social networking centre in the world, but who doesn’t
have a friend himself.
But it also makes clear that Zuckerberg lacks the usual
flaws of his kind: he’s not interested, it seems, in money, riches, fame or
drugs. To him, the prize is to do not to be seen to do. He makes a rich
contrast with Sean Parker (a brilliantly charismatic Justin Timberlake), the
creator of Napster, who briefly influences him but is primarily interested in
the flash and bang that the retiring Zuckerberg isn’t. What he does have is the
drive and ruthlessness that his friend Eduardo Saverin (a wonderful performance
from Andrew Garfield as a marvellously sweet, but clearly naïve and out-of-his-depth
man completely lacking the vision a project like Facebook needs) doesn’t have –
and which makes Saverin unsuitable for thinking in the global terms Zuckerberg
is.
And the film has little time for the Winklevoss twins.
Played with chutzpah in a double role by Armie Hammer (who skilfully
distinguishes both of them), Zuckerberg is right when he describes them as rich
kids who had everything they ever wanted in life – and seem outraged that they
can’t be given the rights to Facebook as well. As he points out they intended
to do nothing other than come up with a concept. These rowers – in a witty
touch their boat is sponsored by that dinosaur Polaroid – also represent the
old elite under siege from new media. The entitled rich, who can’t comprehend
that the world is being handed to them on a plate.
The film also makes for an intriguing meta-commentary on the
growth of social media. From the trolling of Erica, through the bitter feuds
and arguments, the he-said-she-said fighting of the depositions, and the quick
shifts between friendship and rivalry, it also manages to capture the world of
social media in a nutshell. The atmosphere where actions can explode in
people’s perception, where statements you made years ago come back to bite you,
where judgement and criticism are constant and the ability to communicate more
easily also makes fights easier to start, seem more and more prescient.
Fincher’s film does this marvellously, with a wit and sense
of dramatic flair that reminds me of a more grounded Network. Sure the
scene at Henley-on-Thames is hand-in-the-mouth agonising for any British person
to watch (it is littered with major errors from turn-of-phrase to its
understanding of life in Britain), but when every other scene in it is
perfectly done it doesn’t matter. Like any victory, Facebook has many people
claiming to be its father. You could say the film about this film: superbly
directed, a brilliant script and perfectly cast, it’s a triumph.
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