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"FacebookPinterest\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterestCarson.gif\n\nIf so, rest easy. Pro or con, The Social Network's makers aren't too concerned with judging Facebook as an accomplishment. Adding a sneaky double meaning to the movie's title, they're after bigger game. Since FB founder Mark Zuckerberg and the enablers he screwed over all hooked up first at Harvard, welcome to a dead-on look at the parados of America's caste system in this ostensibly egalitarian society of ours. Considering that most of Washington and Wall Street's power brokers are products of the same milieu, timeliness isn't exactly the movie's problem.\n\nIt wouldn't work without Eisenberg's cantankerous performance as the misfit who ended up in a position to buy and sell his classmates. An MVP in the making ever since his role as the older son in The Squid And The Whale, this amazingly focused young actor passes up one easy opportunity after another to make Zuckerberg sympathetic. Thanks in large part to him, the results unspool like a j.v. Citizen Kane crossed with Rebel Without A Cause for nerds.\n\nHobbled by a personality stuck midway between Asperger's and Tourette's, the movie's Zuckerberg is too obtuse or wilful to grasp the point of meritocracy, Ivy League style: to keep the upper crust supplied with grateful satraps in exchange for entree. (Like it or not, Bill Clinton may be the ultimate example.) Enter the pair whose noxious sense of entitlement will taint even their legit beefs down the road: identical twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who are much more in the classic Ivy mold.\n\nIn fact, we're lucky the real Winklevosses\u2014both played by Armie Hammer, abetted by a lot of CGI\u2014are around to remind us such privileged clowns exist. Otherwise, they'd be caricatures too blatant for Legally Blonde, from their ridiculous names and Nordic good looks to membership in Harvard's ultimate sanctum, the Porcellian Club\u2014the opposite end of the spectrum from the lowly Jewish frat Zuckerberg belongs to.\n\nIn the brothers' world, the lesser orders' brains are there to be rented, so they do. But after agreeing to apply his expertise to their notion of setting up a Harvard-only networking site, Zuckerberg puts them off while concocting his own version, abetted by his loyal stooge Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). And presto, \"The Facebook\"\u2014its original name\u2014is born in early 2004, catching on at Harvard and a bunch of other campuses before blanketing the planet like kudzu.\n\nFrom the start, we understand that the outcome of the legal reckoning three years later\u2014with Zuckerberg, now a billionaire, sullenly facing lawsuits from not only the Winklevosses but Eduardo\u2014couldn't matter less. The drama is all in the fault lines between different brands of arrogance and/or naivete. Not only is Eduardo's sappiness his real undoing, but up against a brainiac's stubborn pride in what he can do and they can't, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss's idea of fair play looks like a deck stacked in their favor at birth.\n\nThe movie isn't perfect. Early on, when Zuckerberg's disgruntled tapping at the computer is cross-cut with posh campus hijinks featuring a literal busload of tizzied and susceptible non-Ivy League babes rounded up for the night, the contrast is both overdone and coarsely staged \u2014that is, without compassion for the women being shanghaied into exhibitionism. Yet what keeps The Social Network engrossing at a level of complexity uncommon in American movies since Otto Preminger's best days is that\u2014with the exception of Rooney Mara as the girlfriend whose breakup with Zuckerberg in the opening scene turns her into The Social Network's comely version of Rosebud\u2014Fincher and Sorkin aren't interested in finding an good egg in this can of worms.\n\nOr a villain, since the Winklevosses are just products of the system and far from the worst emplars of moneyed WASP entitlement. In the movie's funniest encounter, the brothers use their family clout to get an audience with then Harvard president Larry Summers (Douglas Urbanski). When the former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury\u2014no Mayflower descendant himself, of course\u2014ridicules their grievances, their honest confusion about how the world works now is almost touching.\n\n Better yet, the inside baseball of Ivy League elitism turns out to have a tale-of-two-subcultures counterpart in the vanities of the crew of hot-shot cybergeeks Zuckerberg assembles in sunny California once Facebook is launched and he's found a hipper partner than Eduardo: Napster creator Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake with a relish that gives the movie a charisma jolt whenever he shows up. Since one world's unctuous \"We're gentlemen of Harvard\" means pretty much what \"I'm wired in\" does in the other, Sorkin's knack for using in-group jargon to reveal people's fetishes and blind spots gets the workout of its life.\n\nIt's matched by Fincher's visual canniness. Though the movie's Harvard had to be faked on other campuses, the surreptitiously baleful atmosphere is wonderfully convincing, from the frowning buildings to the hoary 19th-century dorm rooms that look mutely bewildered to find themselves accomodating 21st-century nebbishes with hoodies and laptops. No matter how many Zuckerbergs and Eduardo Saverins may camp out here, the architecture tells us that only a Winklevoss will ever feel at home. Yet because Fincher didn't direct Panic Room for nothing, even the California sequences turn subtly claustrophobic under their frisky surface. Since Zuckerberg can't help being Mark Zuckerberg any more than Harvard can help being Harvard, both environments end up equally cut off from ordinary life.\n\nAnd if you want someone to feel sorry for, try Oliver Stone. The renegade spawn of more than one bastion of privilege, Stone has tried over and over to make a movie this perceptive and knowledgeable about contemporary society. Now he's been left looking like a chump by a dude who not only never went to college but gave the world Se7en and Fight Club.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nEven reviewers wowed by Fincher's gifts have often been mystified by what he thinks they're good for. The big exception was 2007's terrific Zodiac, his bleakly anti-sensationalistic take on San Francisco's Zodiac killer and how obsessing about the case turned the perp's hunters into victims (if not doppelgangers) by other means. Yet its avoidance of style for style's sake also made it his most anomalous film until this one.\n\nThe Social Network's persuasiveness and energy are even more tonic after the miscalculations of the boneheaded movie Fincher made in between\u2014The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, apparently designed as Oscar bait for everyone who found Forrest Gump's crackle of intellect too daunting. What drew him to that project is anybody's guess. But Fincher's most devoted admirers would probably agree that he's never been the easiest cat to get a handle on.\n\nRemember, he could have profitably gone on remaking Se7en until the end of time\u2014and didn't, doubtless to his accountant's regret. Not mine, though, since that very watchable and astoundingly meretricious thriller\u2014still his biggest hit to date\u2014combined repulsive Grand Guignol and intellectual window dressing glibly enough to make The Da Vinci Code look sedate.\n\n Instead, Fincher's followup was The Game, a more interesting movie than it gets credit for being. Yet its satiric indictment of Clinton-era richies' obscene values didn't click into place until the climax, with not nearly enough wit along the way. That foreshadowed his filmography's worst failing: the way the stunt premises he's usually attracted to end up burying the material's point.\n\nThat's why whatever Fight Club meant to say about modern masculinity got lost in a flurry of strenuous conceits and psychological three-card monte, a confusion that wasn't helped much by the dummkopfs who embraced the movie's skewed take on macho without irony. Similarly, Panic Room's smart ideas about modern paranoia as a function of privilege ended up obscured by logistical TMI, a miscast Jodie Foster\u2014that pinched face of hers is a determined stranger to irony\u2014and Fincher's inability to even fake empathizing with women. Though he doesn't particularly empathize with men either, he's better at delineating them.\n\nLike Benjamin Button, whose reverse-aging gimmick could be taken as one damning comment on star vanity if the way Brad Pitt is photographed wasn't also serving it, all three movies are probably best understood as being \"really\" about Hollywood itself. For better or worse, that's any halfway astute filmmaker's point of entry to understanding how society works. Until now, though, Fincher has tried to express his intuitions about power without recourse to recognizable sociology\u2014just what The Social Network has in spades.\n\nHe seems like a director reborn, but he probably isn't. Hollywood doesn't work that way, and Fincher\u2014the hypotenuse of a triangle whose other components are Darren Aronofsky and Spike Jonze \u2014doesn't either, not least since he wants to keep working. If he secretly identifies with Mark Zuckerberg\u2014a guy so alienated he couldn't even feel like part of a world he'd helped invent\u2014I bet we and maybe even he will never know."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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