The Social Network

My catching up on all the movies garnering Oscar buzz this year began with one of the forerunners, The Social Network. And let me say, the praise is well deserved.

The movie is set during the hearing for the lawsuits against Mark Zuckerberg from, on one side, his former friend Eduardo Saverin, and on the other, the highly athletic Winklevoss twins and their business partner who gave Zuckerberg the idea that lead to facebook in the hopes he'd help them set it up. Instead he took it and ran with it. Yet, despite technically taking place during the hearing, most of the movie focuses on the past and each person's recollections.

There are two things, I think, which set this movie apart from the herd. First, they are able to merge what's happening now and the memories of the past in such an amazingly fluid way that the story never falters in its pace or ceases to surprise. The second is that despite a story that in other hands would probably come across boring (after all a great deal of it is litigation and typing on computers), the tension and interest in where the story is going to go next never stops. Really it all comes down to the rather surprisingly fast pace and tone of the movie, for which credit must be given to the director David Fincher.

But of course a director can only do so much without a good cast, but they certainly don't fail him here. Jessee Eisenberg's constant awkward and sarcastic nature as Zuckerberg is always interesting to watch, and the tension he carries as a character is really reflective of the tension that keeps this movie constantly interesting. Andrew Garfield is wonderful as the betrayed best friend trying to navigate his way through the constantly shifting waters around Zuckerberg. And as much as I love Justin Timberlake on SNL and have the utmost faith in his acting abilities, even I was surprised by his brilliant turn as the shifty devil Sean Parker who founded Napster and leads Zuckerberg morally astray (though also into billions and billions of dollars).

This movie is at turns a tight suspenseful drama, comedy, romance, and satire, and it succeeds at each. I could probably keep singing its praises all over the place (including the rather different but wholly welcome musical score), but I have to wrap it up. So, in the end The Social Network is a masterful piece of acting, directing, screenwriting, and just about everything else. It grabs you from the very first confusion swirled scene until the last click of the mouse at the end and never lets go.

The Social Network gets a 10/10.