Muriel Award: Best Screenplay

Third place:



Dogtooth (written by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou) [70 points / 10 votes]

Second place:



True Grit (written by Joel & Ethan Coen, based on the novel by Charles Portis) [101/18]

And your winner...





The Social Network (written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich) [185/25]

"Among the people I know and the bloggers/critics I read, there wasn't a bigger skeptic going into The Social Network than me. I thought it was the wrong time in Facebook's history, I thought Jesse Eisenberg wouldn't fill out the enigma of Mark Zuckerberg, I thought David Fincher was a curious and misguided choice as director, and I thought the story - such as there actually was one - would be contrived and melodramatic.

I was proven wrong on all of these counts, of course, but above all the reasons I thought it wouldn't work as a film before seeing it, I realized I'd neglected perhaps the film's strongest component in the first place: the dialogue and pacing that is the hallmark of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

I'm familiar with “The West Wing” but I can't say I've ever watched a full episode, partly because Sorkin's forward-thinking (literally, with characters preternaturally thinking two lines ahead of each other) dialogue always seemed so preposterous, no matter how well it worked for the show's purpose. In The Social Network, on the other hand, I couldn't count more than a handful of times in which the panache of Sorkin's voice overwhelmed the pathos of the scene. His characters are young, immature, and jittery - and they should sound like it. Their lines are precursors to the status updates that have defined their generation; they don’t speak so much as they spontaneously remark on the world around them. Indeed, the dialogue in The Social Network is confidently delivered but even more assuredly written, the work of a master writer in complete control of his characters.

Of course, the pace at which all of those lines are delivered must be controlled as well. Fincher and Sorkin were obviously on the same page regarding how the characters should verbally and nonverbally interact with each other, but the credit must go to Sorkin for creating a cogent structure for the story in the first place. Beginning with an incredibly engaging and amusing scene is one thing, but keeping up a consistent pace and allowing for moments of actually reflection and emotion (e.g., the unraveling of Zuckerberg and Saverin's relationship, or the film's final scene) is something else entirely. And this considering how much juicy material Sorkin had to begin with. Though I've not read the original source material for the screenplay, Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires, it's been widely reviewed as a work of near fiction (as in, embellishments of rumors heard second-hand), and Sorkin wisely resisted the temptation turn this story into camp, unlike another recent adaption of a Mezrich book, Robert Luketic's dreadful 21.

The further I get from The Social Network, the more I appreciate the density and flow of Sorkin’s screenplay. On paper it may read like a scattered Facebook News Feed, but the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. In this age of tweets and updates, I find it reassuring that a story about digital communication can succeed in such a traditionally cinematic way." - Daniel Getahun

See the full results.