REVIEW: The Social Network

FACEBOOKED!

Everybody who owns a computer knows what Facebook is, and it is now a part of our lives—we network, give and gain information, wish friends on birthdays and keep track of what’s on. The idea was the thing and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook stole it, and feels no remorse.  This must be a rare film that paints a living contemporary figure in such a negative light, and he didn’t care to sue.  That apart, we live in times when the end justifies the means, and we see as a hero, a boy-man who stole an idea, betrayed his best friend and all he has to say at the end of it is “Oops.”

David Fincher’s film The Social Network, makes an all-talk film fascinating to watch and as taut as a thriller.  The script by Aaron Sorkin is truly the hero of this film, based on Ben Mezrich's book The Accidental Billionaires. Zuckerberg (much better looking than the actor) is played by Jesse Eisenberg as a nerdy, uncool and obnoxious young man (he doesn’t seem to feel the cold and goes around in shorts and slippers). He is rejected by a girl on a date, and in revenge creates a programme that rates women.

He gets into trouble for that, but also catches the eye of the athletic, rich Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer), who want him to set up a Harvard network for them. Meanwhile his friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield) gives him money to start a site called TheFacebook.com, which turns out to be a success, but not as big as it turned out to be, when Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), founder of Napster and charismatic playboy entrepreneur puts his ideas into it—first, to drop ‘The’.

Eventually the Winklevoss brothers and Eduardo sue Zuckerberg, who goes  through the depositions with the attitude that says he has better things to do, and frankly, he couldn’t give a damn. Fincher then places the layers deftly one over the other,  has the cleverest lines heard in a ‘real’ film (do people always have such smart lines on the top of their heads?), and makes the film a cross-examination not just of the man who created Facebook, but of the people who seem to see the net as a substitute for real life.

And what’s amazing, that at the end of it, the thoroughly unpleasant Zuckerberg actually comes across as a poor-little-rich-guy (the babes don’t go for him), which is probably not what Fincher intended.  But what performances, what production design, what dialogue and what a film!  Go see!