Saturday, November 27, 2010

the social network

Jane and I saw The Social Network last night, finally. Aaron Sorkin's screenplay was for the most part very good--snappy, although sometimes too snappy. (Sorkin's Mark Z., cleaned up a bit and given at least a little bit of social/political sense, would do well in the West Wing. Which is perhaps just another way of saying that Sorkin makes all smart characters sound like Toby Ziegler.) But I despised the overwrought pathology (girl dumped him and so....the rest is history) that gives the movie a nice, nice, neat, very neat arc (yuck), and offers a reductive psycho-motivation when surely this person's motives are extremely complex. Can't a movie in 2010 (this far into the genre's history) permit a character extremely complex motives?