Andrew Garfield and Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network.
By Hap Erstein
The central irony of The Social Network is that while the website Facebook was devised to bring friends together, it split longtime friends among its creators apart.
Populated with hyper-smart, glibly articulate characters based on real people, this is that rare studio release that allows itself to wallow in dialogue and gives moviegoers credit for being willing to listen. Although directed with assurance and restraint by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), the film really belongs to screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who gives it the same bullet-train verbal quality that became his signature on TV’s The West Wing.
The story of arrogant, snide Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg (played pointedly by a nerdy, sullen Jesse Eisenberg), his invention of Facebook and the lawsuits he incurred as a result, The Social Network begins in a Cambridge pub. There, after a round of verbal sparring, his had-it-up-to-here girlfriend (Rooney Mara, son to be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Fincher’s remake) dumps him and Mark jogs back to his dorm to slam-blog her as well as exact revenge against all Harvard coeds by posting a which-one-is-hotter Website.
From there, it is a short hop to coming up with Facebook, initially a vehicle for hooking up with Crimson cuties. Enter Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, two hulking, WASPy, privileged twins who row crew and enlist Zuckerberg in creating a social Website of their own, eventually suing him for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook from them. When they take their grievance to Harvard president Larry Summers (a drolly uninterested Doug Urbanski), the result is a sequence of gem-like dry humor.
Interspersed throughout the film are scenes of deposition-taking as Zuckerberg is grilled by lawyers for the Winklevosses and for his former best friend, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), the Facebook chief financial officer who gets left in the dust when the site takes off. Mark’s contempt for those he perceives as his intellectual inferiors – which us to say just about everyone – is nicely illustrated by his witheringly sarcastic comebacks to the attorney interrogations.
Ultimately, though, the movie is stolen from Eisenberg by Justin Timberlake, who gives a very crafty, unctuous performance as nouveau riche elder wunderkind Sean Parker. The founder of Napster, he takes it upon himself to advise and mentor Mark, luring him to Silicon Valley, worming his way into the Facebook hierarchy and ultimately engineering the marginalization of Eduardo.
By the film’s end, Fincher and Sorkin leave it up to us to decide who are the villains of these obsessive machinations, but no one really comes off well. The Social Network is indeed a morality tale for our times.
If the movie belongs to Sorkin – an Oscar screenplay nomination seems a sure thing – Fincher deserves a lot of credit for the film’s insistent forward motion. The Social Network is wordy, but it never feels static. And in a signature Fincher touch, employing the digital wizardry of Benjamin Button without calling attention to itself, ponder as you watch the Winklevoss twins that they are both played by a single actor – Armie Hammer – with the aid of a body double.
Still, The Social Network is a movie of ideas, not special effects, a harbinger that perhaps we really have turned the corner from the summer to awards-worthy autumn. This is a film that is going to generate water cooler conversation, a must-see movie that just might put Facebook – barreling on to its 1 billionth member before long – on the map.
The Social Network is rated PG-13. Opening Friday in area theaters.