Filed under: Uncategorized
By Josiah Burns
So The Social Network is a really good movie. For all you creeps
out there, that’s my current Facebook status. I’ve been to the theater
three times this year (also for Inception and Winter’s Bone), and
Fincher’s latest is easily my favorite. It’s not just about Facebook or
its creator, but also the people he screwed over. The narrative flows
more like The Godfather than a minifeed, jumping between betrayals
within a misogynistic empire of greed.
On paper, it doesn’t sound that fun to watch Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse
Eisenberg) be a dick for two hours. On celluloid, Eisenberg’s so good
it’s a blast. Acerbic stares and veiled scoffs abound as Zuckerberg
outsmarts Harvard, the law, and the Internet itself. He’s a viciously
lovable devil, always ten steps ahead of his audience. Aaron Sorkin (A
Few Good Men, The West Wing) reasserts his reputation as one of
Hollywood’s sharpest screenwriters, alternating between hyper-quick
dialogues and dizzying coding sequences. Against Trent Reznor’s
pulsating score, Fincher sculpts extended music videos. Who knew that
programming FaceMash (a proto-Facebook) could be the subject of the
year’s most virtuosic montage? He’s also not afraid to employ daring
aesthetic techniques to cover important scenes. For example, Fincher
covers the film’s crucial crew race in tilt-shift cinematography, highly
abstracting backgrounds in order to intensify subjectivity.
I think The Social Network is David Fincher’s best film. I’m a
sucker for epic romances, but Eric Roth’s frame narrative in The Curious
Case of Benjamin Button is too clumsy. Here, Sorkin and Fincher
seamlessly weave past and present, overlapping sound cues and repeating
set-ups to create fluid transitions. The Social Network tells an honest,
universal story of ambition, corruption, and its humble origins. In
comparison, Fight Club seems sexist and culturally irrelevant. Zodiac,
while itself something of a masterpiece, runs a reel too long. The
Social Network doesn’t have a single extraneous moment. Each shot
advances the narrative; each character shows a different side of
humanity. Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake match Eisenberg’s manic
intensity, charging the film with nonstop energy. These are three of
many technicians within a greater artistic hierarchy. Fincher’s
storytelling empire (itself a network of actors, crew members, and
rotoscopers) is a well-oiled machine, one of Hollywood’s best.
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
