Anti-social hero

The Social Network
DIRECTED BY: David Fincher
STARRING: Jesse
Eisenberg, Andrew
Garfield, Justin
Timberlake
CERT: 15A

So you’re just going to check your Facebook. You have one message and three notifications.
Four people like your status: “I need coffee!!!” Sandra Ryan Muldoon has commented on your wall post: “Ugh, coffee bleugh! Are u headin’ out tonite?” Jonjo Heffernan has reached level 497 in Farm Wars. Your brother Mikey likes “Whatever Happened To Wibbly Wobbly Wonder Ice Pops?” and two other pages. You have 17 event invitations. You have one cause invitation, “Help Save One-Legged Orphan Lepers In Leitrim”.
And all of this has been made possible because one night, seven years ago, a teenager got sulky over a girl.
Is this true? I don’t know but that’s how it plays out in David Fincher’s new film ­ based on the book by Ben Mezrich and brought to the screen without any input from young billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Whether any or all of the details are accurate, The Social Network makes a fascinating story.
It kicks off on that supposedly fateful evening, when Zuckerberg, presented here by Jesse Eisenberg as an obnoxious little twit with all the charm and social skills of a runaway lorry, gets dumped by his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), because her head is wrecked and she can’t put up with him anymore.
He trots back to his Harvard dorm, gets drunk and slags her off in his blog. Then, as an act of revenge on the female species as a whole, he hacks into the student profile database and creates a website called Facemash, inviting users to rate girls against each other for their hotness.
The site is such a huge hit that it crashes the college server and lands Zuckerberg in hot water. It also brings him to the attention of the Winklevoss twins (both played by Armie Hammer), who have an idea for an online campus network called The Harvard Connection and recruit Zuckerberg to build it.
Instead, he spends the next several weeks establishing his own social network, with some help and financial backing from his friend Eduardo Saverin (Garfield). They call the new website Thefacebook. It’s an instant hit.
Fincher and his writer Aaron Sorkin (the brains behind The West Wing and writer of Charlie Wilson’s War) skip back and forth between this story and the legal depositions that follow some time later, when the Winklevoss brothers sue Zuckerberg for stealing their idea and Saverin comes after his old friend for freezing him out of the company, seemingly under the influence of Napster co-founder Sean Parker (Timberlake), who’s shaken things up at Facebook since coming on board.
Parker convinces Zuckerberg ­ pictured here as idolizing the Napster hero ­ to move out west to Silicon Valley and to start thinking bigger. He also introduces him to the coke and cocktails party scene, though the young wizard is not all that interested. Seems he doesn’t care too much about money, either.
So what drives him? Why is he in it? Well, the final frame of the film suggests that, several years and billions of dollars later, it’s still all about a girl. The real Mark Zuckerberg must have had a good laugh at that.
If you can ignore the mangled facts ­ and the unmangled fact that, really, what you’re watching here is a bunch of unpleasant rich boys squabbling, then Fincher’s movie is a very enjoyable drama.
Visually it’s a less stylish affair than Fincher’s norm (Se7en, Fight Club, Benjamin Button), though still recognisably dark and not a little gloomy. He is not one for teddy bears frolicking in the sunshine.
Sorkin’s script is tight, his writing is very sharp and though sometimes you wish the dialogue wasn’t so wilfully rapid-fire, its quality makes that a forgivable offence. He and Fincher have to be applauded for avoiding the kind of confusion that could have bogged down a story that crosses computer programming with legal procedure.
The cast is very strong, too. Eisenberg couldn’t have made his hero much more unlikeable if he’d butchered his granny ­ and at the same time manages to make him a bit lost and vulnerable. Timberlake does a fine job as dodgy playboy Parker and Armie Hammer is impressive as both of the Winklevoss boys, who appear on screen together thanks to some excellent head-transplanting visual magic.
Andrew Garfield is probably star of the show as Zuckerberg’s wronged friend Eduardo, the only main character who shows signs of having a fully functioning soul.
The film is about the founding of Facebook and the players involved and that obviously must be the focus ­ but still it’s a weakness in the movie that there is so little time given to the actual social impact of the site. The trailers hint at that but the film doesn’t follow through. Which is a lost opportunity to contrast the cold battles of business with the finer things made possible by creative ingenuity – the same ingenuity that led to these wars in the first place.
Just a thought. I’m away to update my status.