Day 55: You Have Part Of My Attention. You Have The Minimum Amount

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010)
Directed by David Fincher
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Erica Albright, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella

People keep telling me I don't watch modern films.  To tell the truth, the reason I started this project was so that I could catch up on the classics.  But in so doing, many of the films that have come out in the last year that everyone and their dog has seen have sort of fallen by the wayside.  So here I am, trying to catch up with the rest of the world.

On that note, here we have The Social Network.  I was very excited when this film came out, but alas, I was broke at the time, so I kept putting off actually seeing it.  Anytime you have this much behind-the-camera talent (director David Fincher, writer Aaron Sorkin and Music by Trent Reznor), the geek in me starts to surface.  Of course, if the movie sucks, I get understandably upset.

But The Social Network, the film that was touted as being no less than THE film of this generation, was...pretty good.  In fact, it was better than pretty good.  But there was only one thing about it that rubbed me the wrong way: the protagonist, Mark Zuckerberg (Eisenberg) is here presented as one of the biggest jerks in history.  Yes, the writing is great, the music is creepy - everything I was expecting from this crack team of collaborators.  But I came away from this film feeling more than a bit down.  I can't root for a guy who sells out one of his best friends and is so emotionally distant and cocky almost to the point of being a sociopath.  Then again, the film didn't really set out to put Zuckerberg in a positive light, which is a good thing.  If that had been their aim, they would have failed miserably. 

All this is not to say that the film is bad.  Like I said, it's wonderfully and artfully directed, written and acted.  But the film's messages of how unfair life is, and how even your best friend can stab you in the back left me feeling more than a bit down.  Though the final shot is a thing of genius.  Zuckerberg sits alone in a room, perusing Facebook (of course), and comes across the page of his ex-girlfriend, who broke up with him in the first scene.  He sends a Friend request.  Captions flash across the screen about what happened to whom after the events of the film.  As Zuckerberg hits the "refresh" button over and over again, the final caption reads, "Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world."  And he's all alone, wondering if his ex-girlfriend still thinks about him.  Just like millions of other poor schmucks.