Natural Born Killers

Facebook isn’t such a great subject for the movies—too much typing. And heroic computer hackers have never, ever inspired cinematic thrills. (Remember Sandra Bullock in The Net? Exactly.) Mainly, though—and let’s see how many film critics admit this—Facebook has quietly left Hollywood in the dust. Not even James Cameron can claim 500 million friends for Avatar, and that’s people returning on a daily basis. We’re the movie now, and it’s a dumb comedy about what sandwich we just ate.

So consider it a wondrous turn of events that The Social Network, a lightning-fast dramatization of the disputatious founding of Facebook, represents not just a revenge of the onscreen nerd, but of those behind the camera, too. It’s a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can’t get online): sparkling dialogue, thorny situations, soulful performances, and an unusually open-ended and relevant engagement with a major social issue of the day: how we (dis)connect. Forget about damage control—if I were billionaire site exec Mark Zuckerberg, I’d be down on my knees in gratitude for an origin story this brainy, suggestive and, yes, flattering. Sort of.

The future CEO himself is portrayed as a furiously snippy Harvard “asshole”—that word becomes something of a theme—by Adventureland’s Jesse Eisenberg, fully breaking the bonds of Cera-dom. Reportedly, the real Zuckerberg lent zero access to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (who tops even The West Wing for mile-a-minute nowness), but he’s been supplied with a fully believable class complex, chafing at the traditions of the university’s exclusive “final clubs.” Giving us a taste of Hollywood’s future Lisbeth Salander, Rooney Mara cuts down her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend thusly: “What part of Long Island are you from, Wimbledon?”

Drunkenly, the computer whiz demolishes her with a passive-aggressive online stunt, “Facemash,” setting up the whole story (and, subversively, Facebook itself) as an offshoot of dumpee rage. Mark soon finds himself hated campuswide, a Shylock courted by two unlikely Antonios, the crew-rowing goy twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played with delicious entitlement by Armie Hammer). They want to apply Mark’s gifts to their own hookup site and help him rehabilitate his image. “Wow. You would do that for me?” the unkempt programmer asks them in their frat’s bike room, resentment brewing.

Sex, money, Jewish paranoia, algorithms—this is merely the movie’s first half hour. The Social Network zings along like nothing attempted since the heady days of Paddy Chayefsky. (We might be looking at the heir to his darkly dazzling Network.) Splitting into deft complexity, Sorkin’s tale toggles to ominous legal conference rooms, developing a pair of shoulder angels for Mark to hear out: his betrayed cofounder, Eduardo (Garfield, the heart of the film); and larky Napster flirt Sean Parker (Timberlake), inviting him to dream bigger. Never preachy, the film becomes a referendum on pushy ambition, both in business and private matters, that’s the signature of Facebook itself, turning a nation of users into self-promoters. These characters will, one day, be us: alienating our “friends” while linking with the world. Do movies ever attempt to analyze the entire weave of life? Now they do.

To think that we once didn’t know what to do with David Fincher. Was he a Kubrickian fussbudget? A stylish torture master picking the wings off Brad Pitt? The bad-boy director of Fight Club and Seven might still be both of those things. But ever since 2007’s ghostly Zodiac (a veiled indictment of Bush-era fear culture), there can be no doubt of Fincher’s seriousness. He wants to make the big films—the ones about everything. The Social Network affords him opportunities for flash: A boat race scored to a computerized version of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is as puckish as anything in A Clockwork Orange. Yet here, too, is a Fincher first: his most alluring, full-bodied lead performance, via the beautifully arrogant Eisenberg. It took a bastard to understand Zuckerberg; to turn him into a cryptic Pandora, lonely with his laptop, took a master.

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Hollywood’s dream factory gazes into the mirror with the sci-fi mindblower.

By Joshua Rothkopf

So this is what $533 million buys you. Before I get into hot water: That’s not the budget of Inception, a luxurious slice of future shock that still has room for a preponderance of lovely sun showers. Rather, it’s the domestic box-office gross of writer-director Christopher Nolan’s previous movie, The Dark Knight. With that bruiser, Nolan, an intellectual prone to wearing trench coats, was vaulted into an echelon occupied only by James Cameron. And like Cameron, the barely-40 filmmaker has now bet the farm—all of his industry clout—on a fantasy. We may be living in the riskiest of Hollywood days.

Inception, though, is no Avatar—instead, it’s the movie that many wanted Avatar to be. In a roaringly fast first hour, we’re introduced to a new technology that allows for the bodily invasion of another person’s dreamworld. Leonardo DiCaprio has been doing this to his female fans for years. Here, as the haunted Dom, a corporate spy, the actor might finally be shorn of that last hint of baby fat that’s larded his adult roles. Dom steals secrets, the big billion-dollar ideas. He’s also something of a pill, estranged from his children and a source of worry to his mentor, Miles (the purring Michael Caine, an Alfredian holdover from The Dark Knight): “Come back to reality,” the elder urges.

Um, right. Nolan, who worked on his script for a decade and preserved most of its secrets, knows that nobody, least of all the audience, wants that to happen. Inception thus commits to that hoariest (if enjoyable) of conventions, the “one last job,” in which Dom will do the bidding of a mysterious Japanese energy magnate (Ken Watanabe) who hopes to fend off a younger competitor (Cillian Murphy) by simply having him quit the business. Dom could plant such a notion in his head, and as the film assembles its crazy team of ultraserious geeks—like a chemist named Yusuf who makes the necessary sedatives (Dileep Rao) or a maze-building architect (Juno’s Ellen Page)—you’ll be reminded of such pseudoscientific larks as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. (And if you haven’t seen that bit of cult wonderfulness, get cracking.)

How can it be that a bunch of people sitting around scheming nonsense can prove so compelling? Only David Fincher knows how to take a studio’s money and spin it as stylishly as Nolan. First and foremost—and with breathtaking verve—out go the laws of physics. As in dreams, these cities fold in on themselves and bridges rear up like pissed-off cats. The plan has not yet begun and already, we’ve gotten an eyeful of slo-mo vertigo.

Yet Inception would be all guff if it didn’t strive for the romantic poetry of the great subconscious fantasias, movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Chris Marker’s immortal La Jetée. There is a woman, lurking on the periphery of Dom’s visions. She has tears in her eyes; sometimes, they hold a saboteur’s glare. Mal is her name (she’s played by the mighty Edith Piaf portrayer, Marion Cotillard) and we soon learn that she is Dom’s wife, and dead. Are these manufactured dreamscapes a bold frontier for him, or a private hell of memory?

Suddenly, the game is on—and my advice to you would be to throw away the rule book. Has any movie so lavishly committed to its dream logic as Inception? Certainly not at the multiplex. And honestly, for all its audacity, this might not be a ringing endorsement. A train comes barreling out of nowhere (that’s not a metaphor; one really does). Several unconscious characters float weightlessly in an elevator shaft. Page—who’s never allowed to be funny, a mistake—gets ski-lodgey in winter whites as a snow fortress is besieged by an armed militia. In short: Help.

But how refreshing it is to be consumed by a raging ambition, not merely the whoosh of a theater’s air-conditioning. Escapism is the goal of the summer season—indeed, maybe of cinema in general—and Nolan has honored that pact considerably while also asking much more of us. His latest, like his 2000 breakthrough, Memento, turns our viewership into a prickly challenge of catch-up: Even though Hans Zimmer’s score blares its tubas with the ominousness of a James Bond soundtrack, this is no mere good-versus-evil shoot-’em-up.

The “kick” is what Dom calls the moment when his team is jerked awake from its mission. Nolan has made a livelihood out of crafting such kicks (in The Prestige, it was an unfortunate bird, crushed in a magic trick). Does plunging through Inception’s many layers of kicks, symbology and interrupted bliss-outs bring us any closer to a higher truth? Maybe not. But oh, to have such dreams.

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