If Roman Polanski had directed "The Social Network"

The best part of The Social Network is its opening titles, with Jesse Eisenberg hurrying silently through the Harvard campus at night. Nothing is spoken for several moments as we watch and the music plays. The music is very good at building anticipation. It paints optimism and warmth in one moment, and danger in the next. It suggests a rich inner life for our protagonist. It made me feel as though I were peeling away the first layer of a mystery- not one with detectives, but perhaps an emotional mystery that would even teach me something new. It said "you have no idea what's coming, but it's going to hit you, George." It more than earned my keen interest.

I am a needy movie watcher. I need to be emotionally involved in the art I am experiencing. What followed in The Social Network didn't completely fail to engage me in this way, but hardly to the degree that this opening- not to mention the film's commercial and critical success, and the opinions of people I know- had led me to expect.

There were moments I liked, and they all belonged to Eisenberg. He really was excellent at bitterly zinging people while looking deeply wounded himself. And the ugliness of that "glottal stop" scene was an interesting surprise. And sure, I get that he's got barrel vision- he's "wired in," to cite a well-used metaphor from the film- and only gets deeper in that mind frame the more he fails socially, which is a big paradox. I get that, and it's something. It places this material a notch above "Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy."



At its best, The Social Network is an uncompromising film that doesn't pander. Yet for each thing this movie has in spades- and snotty dialogue about business, law, and computer code is definitely one of those things- it comes up short somewhere else. Most of all, it just takes itself too seriously. "I wish someone would slip on a banana peel," lamented my wife. A moment later, one of the characters seemed to take her recommendation and gave us a throwaway pratfall. But it only made us sad, like when you order blueberry pie in a diner and the filling is that gooey compote from a can. We just needed to laugh, preferably with the movie. Many, many lines were served in the manner of your favorite bad-good tv drama. Volleyed breathlessly in shouting matches. Left to hang in silence just before a character turns to exit. Or on at least two occasions, delivered after a character actually swivels around in a chair after having faced a window in reverie. Does anyone acknowledge the whiff of Dawson's Creek here? No. They're too busy trying for knock-out punches.

That brings us to Roman Polanski. Had he been in charge here, he would have owned every bit of this hamming. When his films are silly, he knowingly opens a whole can of it. Don't ever see Bitter Moon or Frantic if camp puts you off. Those two films, which Jamie and I once paired in an ill-advised double feature, are on the more guilt-inducing end of Polanski's work. (For those of you who have seen Frantic, Jamie said one of the funniest movie comments I've ever heard at the very end, when you see the garbage truck roll away: "Did he throw her in the trash?")

Think about it: this movie is so serious that it can't even wink about the fact that Justin Timberlake is in it. Polanski might have used him the way they used Paul Reubens in Blow. Come to think of it, he might have fired Timberlake and hired Reubens to be Sean Carter. Then he would have played that business with the chicken- which I think was supposed to be funny- for laughs and creepiness, and scored both. And that pathetic tantrum by Eduardo's girlfriend? Hopeless melodrama needs a good home. That scene would be so much happier in a Polanski film. He might have even let that girl burn Eduardo's building to the ground.

Polanski's new film, The Ghost Writer, is some kind of incredible trick: it seamlessly winks in one moment and throttles you in the next. There are some pretty stunning voyeuristic shocks here, and they're no less powerful for standing next to the tongue-in-cheek moments (example of the latter: that news helicopter scene was pretty silly). And how about the contrast between acting styles? Ewan MacGregor speaks at a clip, and seems to be acting lines straight out of a pithy novel; Tom Wilkinson is darkly methodical, as though directed by Kubrick; Jim Belushi appears finely tuned and rehearsed; and the amazing Eli Wallach comes out of nowhere with a bracing naturalism that shouldn't have any business here. Yet Polanski somehow waves a wand and nothing ever feels stitched together. I don't pretend to know how he does this, how he sells a story that can be comical or outrageous- but it must have something to do with his gracious acknowledgement of those very elements.

I suppose that The Ghost Writer is more traditional as a screen story than The Social Network, and that making this material so hugely cinematic was a more straightforward exercise than trying to make cinema out of the Mark Zuckerberg story. My hat goes off to the effort- it really isn't a bad film. But I'd see The Ghost Writer instead any day.