THE SOCIAL NETWORK

dMYD

Starring Jesse Eisenberg

Trailer

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Facebook: The Movie, scoffed everyone, everywhere, on their Facebook walls. Why are you making a movie about my homepage? Well, because that particular bundle of binary is your life, and this is the historically essential story of the idiot-genius who made it your life, and it’s written by Aaron Sorkin, so it’s the only decent script that’ll be read all year. Let’s go! It’s good! Let’s make ‘Like’ jokes!

It’s funny, it feels fresh, it works as both a gripping boardroom-figures shakedown epic for people who love money and a condemnation of the increasingly insane manner in which we live our ‘personal’ lives for anyone who enjoys the coming apocalypse. Young talent crackling among the actors provides a pleasing dry-run for future success; Andrew Garfield’s going to be a likeable Puny Parker, Jesse Eisenberg should be able to pick and mix projects from now on and J.T forgets his Jackson fetish for two seconds to produce his best work since shooting up spirituality in Southland Tales. Even David Fincher redeems himself for Benjamin ‘Fucking’ Button, muting everything in low hues and autumnal drabness, flicking back and forth through time and relationships for emotional resonance and imbibing the piece as a whole with a sense of surface skimming, an unreality based on flickering screens and shafts of digital code, like the Matrix at Harvard. Those twin-things are definitely a glitch in the system.

It’s a film of fakes and fakery, where everyone save the fall guy has an agenda and a pathological urge to appear as something they’re not to fit into something they don’t really want. Staging the whole thing as a drama allows the film to mirror the weird sub-reality that Facebook itself allows; little of what’s depicted here is real, but audiences the world over will be willing to accept it’s twisting of events as fact because it’s far more gripping than the tired old universe they live in. A great drama about Facebook reflects the site’s warping of boredom itself, a world where profile pictures become epic folly and character traits bulk up into Greek myth. It’s certainly not real life, but who wants that old pile of disappointment for a friend anyway?