October 25th, 2010
Finally saw The Social Network and, like everyone else, I liked it quite a lot. Some thoughts:
* Aaron Sorkin is really, really good and to the extent that The Social Network succeeds, it’s almost entirely because of Sorkin’s script. The movie it most reminds me of is Michael Mann’s The Insider, and like that flick, The Social Network has to overcome two gigantic problems: (1) nothing happens; (2) everyone already knows that nothing happens.
Imagine having The Social Network pitched this way: So this kid writes some code for a website. And then people go to the website, and it becomes really popular. But then, two other kids sue him. The lawyers take depositions. But it never goes to trial. And the audience knows all of this because the kid is basically the new Bill Gates and everyone on the planet uses the website.
Yet Sorkin somehow found a structure to give the entire affair a real sense of dramatic tension. People get hung up on how great Sorkin is with dialogue–and there’s a lot of great dialogue in The Social Network. But dialogue is not story. And Sorkin’s real triumph is the story structure he finds his way to.
* Sorkin’s other great achievement is writing really interesting, three-dimensional, characters. Zuckerberg is a nicely enigmatic presence: interesting, offbeat, both easily lead and willful. He has an Asperger’s-by-way-of-Napoleon thing going on. His best friend, Eduardo Saverin, is winsome but also, at times, slightly pathetic. The movie’s best sleight-of-hand job, however, comes with the Winklevoss twins. We are hard-wired to hate characters like the Winklevossi. Blonde, good-looking, rich, jocks–these kids were the villains in every high school and college movie of the 1980s.
Yet in The Social Network, they’re almost the good guys. Sorkin turns everything we think about them on their heads–and here’s the amazing part–without changing their essential characters. For me, the best part of the movie is when Cameron Winklevoss (I think) insists that they should neither sue Zuckerberg nor go after him in the press because they are Harvard gentlemen. And you realize, Holy shit, he actually believes this noblesse oblige stuff.
* All of which leads me to my last observation: Armie Hammer is a movie star. He eats up the screen. He can do both funny and subtle. He does the most convincing job I’ve ever seen of acting twins.
And if I ran Marvel Studios, I would have put him in Captain America and made a lot of money.
-
“I’m 6′-5,” 220 pounds, and there’s two of me!”
Yes, he’s terrific. By the way, he’s the great-grandson of Armand Hammer, who was the favorite capitalist of Lenin and the favorite communist of Nixon.
DaveT October 27, 2010 at 3:14 am
I’m guessing you never saw Jeremy Irons in “Dead Ringers,” then