Oscars 2011 Death Race Preview: The Social Network
You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so HARD to be.
That presumed attempt to make Mark Zuckerberg marginally more likable to the audience is one of the few feet Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network script puts wrong. It’s pretty clear to us by that point that Zuckerberg isn’t trying not to be an asshole, which isn’t the same thing, and makes Zuckerberg far more compelling — and I think Sorkin knows that, too, so the line is weird. Does Sorkin think the statement is true, or does he expect us to disagree with it?
My other quibble — the Winklevosses-in-England sequence is one of Sorkin’s patented “let me show off how much I now know about X subject” mini-lectures, this time about crew, and goes on too long — is just that, a quibble. (And at least the topic isn’t Gilbert and Sullivan, for once.) Overall, the movie is excellent, a Michael Clayton-type movie whose craftsmanship is rock-solid. I thought that maybe I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it, because Sorkin’s commentary surrounding the movie had been typically obnoxious, but it’s well done, and spending only two hours with him would seem to make his self-regard less overbearing than, for example, watching a handful of mid-period West Wings in a row.
I’ll also defend him against the charge of sexism in the script. Sorkin has shown a disappointing tendency to undercut female characters’ power and competence — giving them dizzy compulsions, or forcing them to ask dumb, out-of-character questions — but I don’t see that here, and the relative dearth of female characters generally speaks more to the milieu and to the Zuckerberg character than to Sorkin wanting to exclude them. Rashida Jones’s lawyer, in fact, seems shoehorned in to give a woman a voice onscreen after Erica has left the story; Jones plays it neatly, so it’s not too bothersome, but the fact that women serve as means to Zuckerberg and Parker, or scenery, fits with the characters. Zuckerberg has a whole rant about how he’s not going back to “that life” where women won’t talk to him, and the movie is about him, so it would have annoyed me more if he’d had a couple of sagely awesome girl/friends like Lloyd does in Say Anything.
It’s a well built, well acted movie — Jesse Eisenberg is amazing. I loved Justin Timberlake in it as well; he’s a charter member of the Matt Damon Takes His Work, But Not Himself, Seriously School Of Awesome. “Um, bong hit?”: with one line, you totally know that guy.
Tags: Aaron Sorkin Jesse Eisenberg Justin Timberlake Mark Zuckerberg Matt Damon movies Oscars 2011 Death Race Rashida Jones Sean Parker
Oh so much word on Timberlake and Damon. They’re two people I never expected to adore as much as I do.
As an adjunct to the dearth of female characters, I was a little apalled to see that Asians were reduced to age-old stereotypes. Every Asian female was an exotic sexpot, and the one Asian male was a drunk coder (no speaking lines). Bizarrely, the one Indian character (Divya Narendra) was played by an actor who is half-Chinese, half-Polish. I’m not of the opinion that all races need to be represented accurately and evenly in every single movie, but after the fourth interchangable Asian groupie, I couldn’t help but be bothered by the implications.
My favorite scene is the Winklevoss twins seeking redress from the Dean, and they way they’re rebuffed and pooh-poohed to. You can see the Dean can’t believe that someone has actually tried to buy that non-cheating honor clause horseshit for a second, and is irritated that he has to out and out say so to rich, handsome, Republican upper 1%ers who SHOULD KNOW THIS ALREADY, JESUS.
And the twins, who are asking the elite they belong to and serve as rich, handsome Republicans Of The Future, providing assholes of their father’s generation pride and entertainment, to put a small part of piles and piles of privlege where their mouths are; are being told that something they thought up and worked on, and had taken from them, was a nothing, busywork, an arts n’crafts project. It’s one of the most fascinating scenes of power, privlege and infantilzation I’ve seen in movies.
I liked this movie a lot more before I read the New Yorker interview with Zuckerberg, which revealed two key pieces of information — a) he has been dating the same (Asian-American) girl since the beginning of the time period shown in the movie, and b) his favorite episode of the West Wing is not, as Sorkin guessed in his section of the interview, the godawful Lemon-Lyman one in which Josh Lyman hates people who use the internet, but the perfectly ordinary “Two Cathedrals,” which is EVERYONE’S favorite WW episode. So I feel like Sorkin’s entire thesis for the Zuckerberg character is completely off. Still a good movie, but I doubt it’s anything close to the truth — and I think a 40something dude who himself despises the internet was a weird pick for a biopic on a young 20something who live and breathes it.
@Jen S. 1.0: my favorite line in the movie is the Dean (or is he the president? I forget) asking his assistant to punch him in the face when confronted by the “Winkelvi’s” blathering.
I like Justin Timberlake in general (I agree that he doesn’t take himself too seriously), but I thought he overacted. In general, though, I’m not as enamored with The Social Network as most people are. (Jesse Eisenberg is great, though.)
I have a strong sense that since Zuckerberg didn’t actually participate in the movie (or the book it’s based on), nor did the Winklevii, that the perspective is going to be pretty skewed. That being said, I thought it was very interesting and I really liked it. I wasn’t sure if I would, because it didn’t seen like Sorkin’s genre, but because it sort of narrates from the legal side of it, it made sense. It was kind of a modern version of Sorkin’s American Fantasy theme that runs through a lot of his work.
Also, since Sorkin basically said it’s heavily dramatized, I don’t worry too much about accuracy. It got the big stuff right (Zuckerberg invents Facebook at Harvard, the Winklevii had a similar idea that they think he stole from them, and the friend who financed the venture got cut out), and the rest, well, it’s a movie, not a documentary.
I got the sense that, sometimes, Sorkin was writing more about himself than about Zuckerberg. Especially the opening break up scene.
I loved the movie, and went into with the attitude that it was, in fact, a drama and not a documentary.
Aside from thoroughly enjoying Timberlake (re: K.‘s charge of overacting — I can see that, though I took it to be how crazy his character was supposed to be), I also loved the score and the cinematography.
@Karen – yes! The walk through Harvard at the beginning of the movie, and then the racing sequence that Sars mentioned, were just gorgeous. I don’t even care that I was being lectured about crew. It was so lovely to look at.
You’re right about the weirdness of that line; it just stuck out so weirdly, after the bold but indisputably righteous move of calling your main character an asshole in the first five minutes. That never lines up with the rest of the film. Zuckerberg as portrayed is in fact helpless NOT to be an asshole.
It’s not in line with reality as far as “Erica” and I’m sure other details being fictionalised, but it was compellingly laid out. I’ve loved Andrew Garfield since Boy A and I loved him here too, and the ‘Lake made a surprisingly fantastic whacked-out Sean Parker.
Per the commentary with Sorkin and the actors, unfortunately, Sorkin did want us to buy that weird line at the end. He even designated Marylin, the second-year associate, as some kind of audience surrogate. Jesse Eisenberg says separately (an edited commentary; he and AS weren’t together) that he asked Sorkin about the line and it had something to do with Sean Parker being a dark side that Mark had found seductive, but he’s really better than that, and Marylin could see that.
The second time around, I disliked that character’s writing in general, and I hadn’t been wild about her the first time. I kept looking for evidence that there was more to her than just an eagerness to ingratiate herself and warm herself by the heat of MZ’s brilliance while midwifing some of the screenplay’s ideas, but I can’t get there. However, I didn’t really get “sexist” from the movie. I agree that it was more that there was a dearth of women, and that this felt correct for the characters. Of the ones there were, the only ones I liked were Eduardo’s attorney and Erica.
I finally saw this last night and have to admit that I was impressed. I hated Jesse Eisenberg after “Adventureland,” and wanted to see if he could do anything else. Turns out, I like him very much as a fundamentally unlikeable character.
I also liked Erica, even if she was barely in the movie, and didn’t mind Rashida Jones’ character. I’ve also always liked Sorkin, even if he did get on my nerves from time to time, so that helps. As far as the crew scene in England, I loved it, but I also rowed competitively in college, so there you go.
And Timberlake was fun–loved his character.
The actual race was beautifully shot and edited, but what I liked about the Winklevosses-in-England detour was the texture of the dialogue afterward; the things said and implied. People were repeatedly emphasizing to the losers “Oh, you were SO CLOSE,” and of course there’s the thematic rhyme there with their Harvard Connection and MZ’s Facebook; but purely on the surface, it’s realistic as what people say and what an athlete does not need/want to hear at that point. The Winklevoss actor was good at gritting out the gracious responses while suggesting a desire to be somewhere else. And the father…when one of the twins says, “I’m just sorry you came all the way over here for that,” he replies, “Don’t apologize for a race like that, son. Don’t EVER apologize for a race like that.” The words on the page sound kind, but the actor (who is in the movie for all of a minute) really gets a character into that line. It isn’t just “Be proud of your splendid effort”; there’s a hint of “I’m slightly disappointed that you just showed weakness.”