If you’ve read the script for Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Network” then you know it’s powerful stuff waiting to be unleashed on the season. Well, Scott Foundas is first out of the gate with an extremely early critique of the film, and it’s all thumbs up from Brett Ratner’s best bud. To wit:
David Fincher’s The Social Network is big and brash and brilliant…It is nominally the story of the founding of Facebook, yes, and how something that began among friends quickly descended into acrimony and litigation once billions of dollars were at stake. But just as All the President’s Men—a seminal film for Fincher and a huge influence on his Zodiac—was less interested by the Watergate case than by its zeitgeist-altering ripples, so too is The Social Network devoted to larger patterns of meaning. It is a movie that sees how any social microcosm, if viewed from the proper angle, is no different from another—thus the seemingly hermetic codes of Harvard University become the foundation for a global online community that is itself but a reflection of the all-encompassing high-school cafeteria from which we can never escape. And it owes something to The Great Gatsby, too, in its portrait of a self-made outsider marking his territory in the WASP jungle.
To sayt he least, in most conversations I’m having leading up to the awards season, Fincher’s film is perhaps the most anticipated. If even half of these sentiments are fair, then I think it’s safe to say a bona fide contender is comin’ round the bend. Read the rest of Foundas’s thoughts at Film Society of Lincoln Center.
“The Social Network” opens the New York Film Festival September 24.