Social Network review: Not about Facebook, but about friendship

Anything but a primer on social media, the film explores people’s drive for acceptance.

Anything but a primer on social media, the film explores people’s drive for acceptance

The Social Network isn’t about Facebook. If you’re a PR person expecting to trade two hours for a continuing education credit on the cheap, stay home.

But The Social Network is one of the best movies of the year. It’s a crackling-good story about thoroughly unlikeable people, told at a rapid-fire pace, in dialogue that in its best moments recalls David Mamet and Neil Labute. Credit director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac, Seven) for the foreboding visual sense of the movie—even the bright scenes suggest impending darkness—and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, A Few Good Men), who has a playwright’s gift for dialogue and an engineer’s insight into what matters most.

Add to that Justin Timberlake’s turn as an oily, little party boy living on other people’s money, plus Jesse Eisenberg as an angry, steel-trap introvert—imagine Hannibal Lecter as vegan, virginal, and just post-pubescent—and the picture is elegantly and appropriately furnished both behind the camera and in front of it.

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