New on DVD: "The Social Network," a bold and brilliant film.

Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake speak of Cameron Diaz, Jessica Biel and other things that men discuss.

 The Social Network hits DVD and Blu-Ray this week. Here's Matt's review.

The great peril of making a film like The Social Network, would be to make it, perhaps predictably, in the spirit of great entrepreneurialism, a film about a smart person who did a great thing and then had to defend himself as everyone tried to steal it. It would be easy to canonize Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and to tell his story in a “Kids, be all you can be” kind of way. He is a genius, after all, and the youngest billionaire in the world, and he created something that revolutionized the way we communicate the world over.

But we already know that.

Any film depicting the things we’ve already seen, heard and thought about Facebook would be doomed to fail. Facebook has permeated the social consciousness like few other things in, well…ever. Whether you’re a rabid user or you simply use it as an excuse to talk about how kids these days don’t know the value of face time, you’re perpetually aware of the impact. 

The Social Network, helmed by dual revolutionaries director David Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) and writer Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, The West Wing), avoids these pitfalls skillfully, and instead becomes a film about an obsessive, driven genius more interested in social revenge than social expansion.

In 2003 Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is a sophomore computer geek at Harvard obsessing over his ability (or inability) to get into exclusive campus clubs. When his girlfriend, fed up with his bad attitude, dumps him in a bar one night, he goes back to his dorm, writes an angry blog, then begins building a website where his fellow students can rank Harvard girls by hotness. The site is so frequently visited that it crashes the campus server in a matter of hours, and makes Zuckerberg infamous.

It isn’t long before a new idea develops, an idea for a social networking site unlike any other. Working day and night over a period of several weeks, with finance from his partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), Zuckerberg crafts a site he calls “The Facebook,” which rapidly gains a following and turns him into something of an Ivy League rock star.

The film leaps backwards and forwards in time, simultaneously chronicling the rise of Facebook from Harvard exclusivity to a worldwide social media empire and the subsequent fallout as Zuckerberg is simultaneously sued by Saverin and a pair of Harvard athletes who claim he stole their idea for the site.

The true genius of the film is that there are really no heroes or villains. Zuckerberg is never portrayed as a crusader or a martyr or a thief, but rather a somewhat pompous nerd on a mission to be better than everyone else. Saverin might be a victim, but he’s also often apathetic, distracted and combative with his cohorts. Everyone is too complex to be labeled, and this somehow makes everything all the more riveting than any good versus evil tale could be. 

As I mentioned earlier, beating the audience over the head with the “Facebook changed the world” theme was never going to work out. Fincher and Sorkin avoid this by making the movie personal. We see how Facebook changes Zuckerberg’s life, and Saverin’s, and their inner circle of friends, colleagues and enemies. We don’t see arbitrary news reports, media interviews with the characters or editorializing by pundits. Instead, something brilliant happens. Fincher, always the visual stylist, accomplishes nearly all of the global impact vibe through visual styling. As Zuckerberg sits in his dark dorm, crafting a revolution on his desktop, Harvard frat boys party. The audience realizes that the real socializing, the real status enhancement, is happening where no one at the time expected it to, and it’s this subtlety that makes the film so thematically dense.

Sorkin’s contribution, apart from his usual brilliance with dialogue, is unflinching, brutal characterization of everyone involved. When we first meet Zuckerberg, he’s socially awkward, superior, and trying to impress everyone. Later, after he’s a billionaire, he’s still socially awkward, superior and trying to impress everyone, even after he’s made everyone in the world friends with everyone else. It’s an unexpected, harsh revelation about geniuses. They’re often just it in for themselves. 

At the same time, the character is never concerned with making a lot of money (as the hoodies and flip-flops he sports in nearly every scene indicate), nor is he really concerned with making lots of friends. He’s concerned with superiority, with being the sharpest mind in every room, and this phenomenon manifests itself through snide remarks, intellectual boxing matches and no small amount of smugness. But at the same time, he’s constantly trying to prove that he’s not a bad guy, just misunderstood. It’s this complexity, this maddening struggle within a once-in-a-generation mind, that makes The Social Network so riveting.

But of course, this degree of character complexity couldn’t be done without an outstanding cast. Eisenberg, so often seen as the nice guy, shines as Zuckerberg, digging deep to find a savage brilliance that’s both exhilarating and at times terrifying. Garfield is almost as wonderful as Saverin, and Justin Timberlake (yeah, the singer) is flat-out surprising as Napster founder and Zuckerberg cohort Sean Parker.

Take all of this, throw in superb photography, a mind-blowing score by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and the relevance of the subject, and you’ve got a near perfect film that’ll make your brain hum like a computer processor. It’s a flick that’s neither a condemnation nor a vindication of Facebook. It’s simply a meditation on how something so big comes to be, and how costly it is for the people who lived it. 

Matt’s Call: It’s right up there with Inception in a bout for movie of the year. I don’t care if you use Facebook or not. You need to see this film, not because of its topical relevancy, but because it’s a shining example of truly great storytelling.