The Social Network (2010) review

The film opens with a breakup in a bar that lasts six minutes and tells you everything about its protagonist: he is brilliant, he is insufferable, and he will spend the rest of the film trying to prove he does not care what anyone thinks of him. Everything after that is consequence.

Sorkin's Structure

Aaron Sorkin's screenplay is built around two depositions — one from Eduardo Saverin's lawsuit, one from the Winklevoss twins' — which frame the film's flashbacks. The structure allows the film to present three competing accounts of the same events and to let the audience judge which is closest to the truth. It is one of the most elegantly constructed screenplays of the century.

Sorkin's dialogue is at its best here because it is matched to a director who does not treat it as sacred. Fincher cuts across sentences, overlaps dialogue, and keeps the camera moving through conversations in ways that prevent the script from becoming a filmed play. The famous opening scene was shot in ninety-nine takes, and the result is a rhythm that no other Sorkin film has achieved.

Read more about biography cinema in our Drama genre hub, explore the work of David Fincher in our directors section, or see where this film lands in best films of the 2010s.

Fincher's Control

The film is Fincher's most controlled work, and the control is entirely in service of the material. The camera is frequently locked down, the colour palette is muted and slightly cold, and the film's use of shallow focus keeps the audience on faces. Jeff Cronenweth's photography gives the Harvard sequences a damp, autumnal quality and the Palo Alto sequences a bleached brightness that makes them feel exposed.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won an Oscar for a score that is essentially an electronic soundscape, and it is one of the most influential film scores of the decade. The main theme — a pulsing piano figure over a distorted bass — creates a sense of relentless forward motion that matches the film's subject. The score's refusal to be melodic is what allows the film to be about a company rather than a person.

Eisenberg, Garfield, and the Central Relationship

Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg is a remarkable creation because the film never asks the audience to like him. He is lonely, vindictive, and brilliant, and Eisenberg plays the intelligence as a form of aggression. The performance is a study in a person who can process information faster than anyone in the room and has no idea how to be in the room.

Andrew Garfield's Eduardo Saverin is the film's emotional centre and its tragedy. He is the only character who behaves like a friend, and the film's most painful scene is his realisation that he has been managed. The deposition scene where he destroys Mark in a single sentence — 'Sorry, I'm just checking to see if I'm being taken advantage of' — is the best moment in the film. Armie Hammer's dual Winklevoss performance is a technical marvel, and Justin Timberlake's Sean Parker is the most fun the film has.

What the Film Is Actually About

The film is not really about Facebook. It is about a specific kind of person who is enormously capable and fundamentally unable to connect, and about what that combination produces in a culture that rewards it. The film's framing device — Mark sitting alone in a deposition room, refreshing a friend request from his ex-girlfriend — makes the argument explicit without stating it.

The film's accuracy has been contested by the real participants, and Sorkin has acknowledged taking liberties with the sequence of events. That matters less than it might, because the film is not a documentary and does not pretend to be. It is an argument about a particular kind of American success, and it is one of the sharpest arguments ever made on the subject.

Themes and ideas

• Ambition and isolation
• Friendship as a liability
• Intellectual property and ownership
• The cost of a particular kind of success