Fridae

I don’t think I’m being flippant here, but hard work is overrated. To be truly rich, you need to have that killer instinct in you, that willingness to do very nasty, possibly unethical, and borderline illegal things. Just ask the robber barons of history – the railway barons of America, the oil oligarchs of Russia, and the long list of prisoners who once held the title of “richest man in China”.

I suppose robber baron movies keep getting made because they’re very entertaining in their salaciousness and they’re not very far from the actual truth. One might count There will be Blood, The Third Man, Citizen Kane, the two Wall Street films, Gangs of New York, The Insider, Pirates of Silicon Valley in this genre. But what about The Social Network? Here, protagonist Mark Zuckerberg is the guy who achieves social mobility through underhanded though not necessarily illegal means.

Yet if you look at it, Sorkin and Fincher depart from the grand tradition – this is one of the rare robber baron films that actually puts the spotlight on the actual slimy rise to power of the robber baron. For example, The Third Man was a noir mystery, Gangs of New York a wuxia revenge tale, and Wall Street Faust redux. Scriptwriters seem to realise that their film will feel too meanspirited or nasty if the main story merely dishes out salacious detail after salacious detail, but Alan Sorkin feels that the story behind the rise of Facebook is entertaining and illuminating enough to risk it. Quite wisely, Sorkin’s script casts Zuckerberg as a villain not because of his underhanded doings, but because he is an asshole to his loyal friends. That makes the film far less tedious than it could be, and far more interesting.

Watching the story unfold on the big screen is like a fly on the wall experience. Despite the film being told in flashbacks in between legal hearings and stuffed with expository geek talk, you feel a sense of palpable excitement of being there as Mark Zuckerberg slowly invents Facebook, or how he slowly fixes both his opposition and his friends. Sorkin probably realises that Zuckberg is a character that is made the more engaging the more we know about how unlikeable, how socially inept (or just dismissive of social niceties) and untrustworthy he is. Yet the way Jesse Eisenberg (Zombieland) plays him, you’d be more attracted than repelled by these character shortcomings.

The film pulls no punches at anyone involved in the rise of Facebook – not Zuckerberg, not his victims, and not even its white knight, Napster founder Sean Parker (played by an inspired Justin Timberlake). The Social Network is not the shocking tell-all that it can be (The New Yorker published an even more damning article on Zuckerberg and Facebook), and turns out to be more of a tribute to genius and entrepreneurship than a character assassination piece.