The Social Network
Directed by David Fincher
Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

I have nothing but the utmost respect for David Fincher, who I think is consistently one of the best directors working in modern cinema, and Aaron Sorkin, who, as a dramatic writer, is almost peerless. That’s why I was so excited for The Social Network — and became even more excited when the film began to garner glowing reviews. (At the time of this writing, it has a 97% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes — in other words, 97% of all reviews for the movie were positive.)

Unfortunately, it isn’t one of the five best scripts Sorkin has ever written, and it isn’t one of the three best films Fincher has ever directed. It’s certainly not the best movie of 2010 — heck, I don’t think it’s even one of the five best movies of 2010, let alone one of the ten best films of the year. It’s a perfectly good movie and I wouldn’t fault anyone for enjoying it, but it’s definitely not a great film.

First of all, we need to discount the fact that film is based on a true story. The myriad ways in which the filmmakers deviated from the actual events on which the movie is based have been well-documented, but in case you’re curious, /Film has a very good article giving a brief overview on some of the changes Fincher and Sorkin made. Dramatists have been making altering history in order to tell the strongest possible story pretty much for as long as anyone can remember, and I don’t fault that them for that; I’d rather see a good story well told than a historically accurate story told that’s boring, disorganized, or that fails to exploit all available dramatic opportunities.

But given that Fincher and Sorkin chose to deviate from history, well… why not do so in the name of telling the strongest possible story?

The blame, I’m sad to argue, lies primarily with Sorkin’s story choices.

Mark Zuckerberg, at least as portrayed in The Social Network, is, like so many Sorkin protagonists, incredibly arrogant. The lead characters in pretty much all of Sorkin’s scripts, from A Few Good Men to The West Wing to Charlie Wilson’s War, are all, to put it indelicately, boastful, sarcastic, smart-ass pricks. And yet, Sorkin always manages to get the audience on their side pretty much from the get-go. Why?

Because a) they’re smart, b) they’re witty, and c) they’re right. Take, for example, Lt. Daniel Kaffee, the naval attorney played by Tom Cruise in the film version of A Few Good Men (based on Sorkin’s Broadway play of the same title). When we first meet Kaffee, he’s on a softball field enjoying batting practice with a teammate, Sherby; but we soon learn that he’s supposed to be in court:

Right off the bat (no pun intended), we learn that Kaffee is irresponsible (he’s playing hookie from work), and that’s he kind of a shit (he responds to being caught not with humility or an apology, but, rather, with facetiousness). But look how the rest of the scene plays out: Spradling tells Kaffee he’s going to charge his client with “30 days in the brig with loss of rank and pay,” to which Kaffee responds –

We like Kaffee now, because we see why he’s not taking this case seriously — it doesn’t warranted serious consideration. Now Sorkin shows us that Kaffee is smart, too:

And that’s it. Kaffee wins his case. Sure, he’s still an arrogant prick, but we really, really like him. We don’t even really know what the movie is about yet, but we know we want to follow Kaffee on the journey in which he is about to partake.

Contrast this with the opening scene of The Social Network, in which Zuckerberg treats his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Erica, like crap. After telling Erica that “there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States,” he goes on –

Erica’s not wrong. Mark is all over the map. And he calls his poor girlfriend “crazy” for really no good reason, other than she has completely failed to read his mind. In fact, she’s suggesting that she believes in him — that he might be able to row crew if he practiced — and he’s dismissing that belief.

Mark continues to behave in an obnoxious and pompous manner, even going so far as to suggest that Erica doesn’t have to study because the school she attends, Boston University, is inferior. She finally breaks-up with him (and who could blame her?), telling Mark –

And she’s right. In fact, the whole movie is more or less about how she’s right.

So Mark is arrogant like Kaffee, but he’s not witty the way Kaffee is, he’s not correct the way Kaffee is, and he hasn’t displayed intelligence the way Kaffe has. Sure, you could argue that he’s a Harvard student, so we can deduce that he must be smart, but that’s a major violation of the classic “Show, don’t tell” rule (and, besides, I knew some pretty stupid kids who somehow got into Harvard).

In fact, at no point does Sorkin ever demonstrate that there’s anything remarkable about Zuckerberg. Facebook isn’t his idea — he steals it from some classmates. And the business plan that launches Facebook isn’t his, either — it’s that of his friend, Eduardo, and later, of Sean Parker, the Mephistopheles character of the piece. This is specially pointed out during a dinner scene between Mark, Eduardo, and Sean, when the trio are discussing expansion:

So if the idea for Facebook wasn’t Mark’s, and it wasn’t Mark’s ideas that allowed Facebook to get bigger and bigger, then what is The Social Network? The story of a very talented computer programmer who was also a bad friend. He wasn’t notably smart, he wasn’t noticeably funny, and he wasn’t noticeably right. He was arrogant because he was good at writing computer code.

So why am I watching this movie?

There’s been a lot of talk about Mark, as a character, is “Shakespearean,” but that’s not true — he doesn’t have the dimensions of a Shakespearean character. You could argue that Kaffee does. But Kaffee, again, demonstrates that he’s arrogant for a good reason. Mark is just arrogant, and, well, kinda lucky to be around the right people at the right time.

Watching The Social Network, I was reminded of a much stronger script by Sorkin — a play called The Farnsworth Invention that tells the story of Philo Farnsworth and the creation of television (by which I mean the actual scientific creation of television, not the creation of television programming). In that play — also culled from history — Philo Farnsworth, a young, struggling inventor, finds himself at odds with David Sarnoff, an executive for the National Broadcast Company (that’s “NBC” to you) who is also trying to invent television. We get to know both characters; to see how Sarnoff, a Jewish immigrant, pulled himself up through the ranks at NBC through intelligence and hard work, and we follow Farnsworth, a Doogie Howser-level genius from a working-class background, every step of the way as he struggles to make a working television, failing time and again until he finally succeeds — only to see Sarnoff use a spy to steal the invention away from him, much the way Zuckerberg steals Facebook in The Social Network. Philo and David are both fully-realized, three-dimensional characters; they’re both intelligent, and they’re both highly flawed. THOSE characters are Shakespearean; we feel for both of them, and Philo’s story is, ultimately, a real tragedy.

If only The Social Network were as good.