I love a good DVD commentary track almost as much as a good movie, and I had heard the tracks for The Social Network were particularly excellent, so I rewatched it recently with both tracks, David Fincher's as well as Aaron Sorkin's with a few members of the cast (Jesse Eisenberg*, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, and Armie Hammer, the guy who played the Winklevi). It wasn't a game-changer, as far as commentary goes (my favorite is still Raging Bull, which has something like four or five superb commentaries, especially from Michael Chapman, the cinematographer, that I watched back to back to back over a few days and that made me love the movie even more--yum!), but pretty interesting stuff. My few notes of interest:
David Fincher, at least from the evidence of hearing him talk about his work and his colleagues for a couple of hours, seems like a total sweetheart and a wonderful person to work for. Can this possibly be so? I just assume you have to have a huge jerk quotient to direct hundred-million-dollar movies--especially if, like Fincher, you ask for 30 or 50 takes for each shot. And this may still be true, but he certainly presents well.
Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that over four hours or so of commentary, the name "Ben Mezrich" was never spoken. Does that name ring a bell? He was the author of The Accidental Billionaires, the book the movie was based on, but throughout the commentary, all the elements of the story and characterization were credited to Sorkin, the screenwriter. Which is certainly not new in the movies--the books movies are "based on" are often left in the dust, along with their authors. But in this case I remembering being struck, when I first saw the movie having already read the book, at how closely the movie hewed to the book, both to its weaknesses and its strengths. I knew, from interviewing Mezrich when the book came out, that the fact-to-book-to-movie adaptation had an abnormally compressed development (which nearly matched the speed at which Facebook has taken over our lives): Sorkin was working on the script at the same time Mezrich was completing the book. Does that mean that Sorkin did have a strong role in developing the story in the book as well? Could be, but my sense from Mezrich was otherwise, especially since the book so closely fits the narrative pattern of his other books.
Mezrich's book is not a great one--it's not written with much subtlety and it felt like he was cramming this big, complicated corporate drama into what has become the Mezrich formula: Ivy League nerds make a lot of money so they can finally get laid. I was frustrated with that in the book, and then very surprised at how closely to that formula the movie stayed (and I was also surprised at how good the movie was, despite that). But really, you're still going to try to tell me Facebook was just built out of sexual frustration?
But the thing that impressed me about the original book was that Mezrich, despite having a clear point-of-view because Eduardo Saverin, the disgruntled co-founder, was his main source, still managed to let you see the justice (and flaws) of each of the main characters' positions: Eduardo and the Winklevosses each were there at the beginning and had legitimate claims to the business, but none of them would have taken it to where Mark Zuckerberg did. And that moral balance is one of the great achievements of the movie as well, which brings me to my last note about the commentary track: I loved the way each actor still saw the story from the perspective of the person they were playing. Eisenberg was a passionate advocate for Zuckerberg, Garfield for Saverin, Timberlake for Sean Parker, Hammer for the twins, even though each of them, except perhaps Saverin, comes off unsympathetically at various moments in the story. And it comes out subtly enough (perhaps because most of the actors' commentaries were recorded separately) that only as the commentary goes on do you realize the investment each actor had--and still has--both in his character and in the real person in the actual drama.
I'll credit Fincher for shepherding his actors well, to encourage that investment. And perhaps the unmentioned Mezrich too, for giving each character his reasons. But it's funny to me that in this story of a forgotten founder being written out of the corporate history, the writer who first told the story seems to have largely been forgotten as well.
* Whose performance just gets better each time I watch the movie, by the way.
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