This is a fine movie, even if it weren’t based on Mark Zuckerberg and regardless of whether it is really the truth. Director David Fincher knows how to tell a story.
The Social Network (Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake) – Mark Zuckerberg is a billionaire, one of the richest men in the world. And he’s only 26 years old. He just agreed to donate $100 million to the Newark Schools to help rehabilitate one of the worst school districts in the country. It wasn’t lost on anyone that that gift was timed to coincide with this relative scathing portrayal of the former Harvard student who founded Facebook with his friend and early financier, Eduardo Saverin, in the movie The Social Network.
The curly-haired nerd is presented as a brilliant, fast-thinking, fast-talking social misfit who changed the world. He used his own observations and a fledgling idea from three former classmates to create an interactive contact point boasting over five million people. Me included.
This is the back-story or at least purports to be. Did he really steal the idea from the Winklevoss twins and their friend? Or did he just take their germ of an idea and combine it with his own previous attempts to engage his fellow Crimson students into a universal phenomenon. Jesse Eisenberg (Adventureland, Zombieland, Solitary Man) portrays Zuckerberg as obsessed, socially inept, and ego-filled with a touch of insecurity about not being invited into the exclusive clubs at Harvard. Zuckerberg doesn’t care about money; he doesn’t do all this for the profit, which is contrasted with his partner, Saverin (in an excellent portrayal by Andrew Garfield), who provides the financial backing (under $20,000) for the venture and serves as Facebook’s first chief financial officer. Saverin sees the potential to make money by selling ads on Facebook. Zuckerberg thinks of it mainly as a way to get popular, famous and give kids a way to interact without having to know each other first (OK, really, he does it to impress a girl).
As Zuckerberg’s path leads to a darker side, he befriends Napster founder Sean Parker (acted surprisingly well by rocker Justin Timberlake), who identifies with Zuckerberg’s desire to change the world (as Parker did for the world of music). But he also sees Facebook as a billion dollar enterprise. He convinces Zuckerberg to move to the Silicon Valley, employ the programmers he needs to go international, and infects the genius in a number of not-so-positive ways.
The manner in which director David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fight Club, Panic Room) tells the story almost makes you think that Zuckerberg will ultimately fail (which he doesn’t, of course). He uses flashbacks from depositions of the Winklevosses in their first lawsuit against Zuckerberg (settled out of court) to tell much of the story, which is an effective technique used many times before. But he also deftly uses Saverin’s lawsuit against his former partner to portray the seeming contradictions of Facebook’s mastermind. A major footnote here is that there are many people who think The Social Network is a work of fiction, taking the Winklevoss twins’ animosity and elevating it to biography status. Zuckerberg claims not to have seen the movie. The debate will rage on as to whether Zuckerberg stole the idea and, having promised the twins and their partner that he would write the programs to being their vision to life, reneged or whether the intellectual property he created stemmed from his own observations and previous work.
No matter what, everyone made money on the deal. The Winklevosses got $64 million and might get even more. The Newark Schools win. And five million-plus people worldwide get a social experience that is either the coolest thing around or, as Betty White said on Saturday Night Live, is a “giant waste of time.”
As a movie, it works better as fiction than as a portrayed as a true story (though not many people would have seen it if it weren’t about the king of Facebook). It should, however, carry a banner: “Based on a true story using facts that may or may not be accurate.”