Last night at 3 AM, I decided to interrupt a routine e-mail of editing notes to the other Olde English guys with a capsule review of “The Social Network” written in the voice of a stuffy and pompous New Yorker critic. I forget why — it was 3 AM. The next day, I found that I basically still agreed with the review, so here it is:
David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have achieved a bittersweet success; their new film “The Social Network” is an exceptionally well-made biography that manages to completely overlook the most fascinating aspects of its subject’s life and character. Mr. Zuckerberg is a true visionary — a 26 year old who conceives of technology on the rarified, decades-ahead timeframe peopled only by a few high level executives at Google, Apple, and a handful of others; executives, to a man, twenty five to thirty years his senior. Yet this exceptional prescience is dismissed handwavingly by Fincher and Sorkin as mere genius, a gift bestowed on Zuckerberg by pure chance and by extension unworthy of comment. Rather, they argue, Zuckerberg is most interesting because of his lack of social skills and his envy of the “haves” that people Fincher’s brown-tinged Harvard. In their account, Zuckerberg created Facebook not because he was one of the most prescient thinkers of our time, but because he was jealous of the guys on the crew team. This makes for a terrific story, yes — yet once you leave the theatre, the question left lingering is whether it is truly Zuckerberg’s. True, at the age of twenty-six, Zuckerberg’s legacy hasn’t yet been written; still, we can’t help but think that, as good as “The Social Network” is — and yes, it is — fifty years hence, it may be best known as a film that ultimately let the man it sought to capture slip through its fingers.
