Too soon for a film bio of the guy who founded Facebook, way back in 2004? Not these days, when lives and fortunes are made at the speed of the fastest Internet connection.
So here’s “The Social Network,” a clever and extremely entertaining account of how Facebook came to be (and the fallout that followed its rapid rise).
No quickie cash-in, this movie has a sterling pedigree: It’s directed by A-lister David Fincher (“Zodiac”) and written by “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin.
Sorkin worked from a 2009 book by Ben Mezrich. The tale begins at Harvard in the early Aughts, where a student, Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg), hatches a little online student-socializing program called thefacebook.com.
Arrogant, articulate and socially clumsy, Zuckerberg quickly finds himself in trouble. His business partner (Andrew Garfield) has very different ideas about how to make money off the site; the Mephistophelian founder of Napster (Justin Timberlake, exactly right) lures Zuckerberg out to the swinging West Coast; and fellow Harvard students claim Zuckerberg stole their idea.
In fact (it takes a while to realize this), the movie is structured around two lawsuits against Zuckerberg. We keep flashing forward to court proceedings as the story goes along; in some ways, this is a legal thriller.
But it wants to be more than that. “The Social Network” aims to be a statement about its time, a zeitgeist picture that tells us something about ourselves.
It moves at a quick-stepping, no-wasted-motion pace. Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue will be familiar to fans of his TV work: the opening sequence alone, in which Zuckerberg tries to impress a girlfriend (Rooney Mara), is a dizzyingly funny and incisive scene that tells us a lot about Zuckerberg’s head.
The girlfriend is just about the only female character of note, by the way. This is an alarmingly male-oriented movie, even given the “revenge of the nerds” world it describes.
Sorkin and Fincher have a thorny issue here: How to make a movie about a jerk. One solution is to have other characters remark that Zuckerberg is a jerk (they don’t use that word), which is a lazy out.
The filmmakers also subtly shift the emotional weight of the final third of the picture to Zuckerberg’s business partner, wetly played by future “Spider-Man” actor Garfield. Maybe they thought Zuckerberg’s intelligence and abrasiveness were too much for the audience to take, and maybe they were right — but the shift takes us away from the movie’s most fascinating character.
Jesse Eisenberg, late of “Zombieland,” is terrific as Zuckerberg. Along with his verbal dexterity, he actually lets you see the character pause in mid-thought, a rare skill.
There’s also an amusing performance by Armie Hammer — well, performances, actually, as this looming actor plays twin brothers, the Harvard classmates who insist they had the idea for Facebook first. (The technical feat of digitally getting both twins in the same shot is pure David Fincher territory.)
“The Social Network” is bracing in its smart, swift momentum. It falls short of its ambitions, and it doesn’t define its era the way it wants to. But 25 years from now it’ll probably be watched as a time capsule, nonetheless.
“The Social Network” ½
A rapid and very entertaining look at the development of Facebook and its socially awkward inventor, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg). Aaron Sorkin’s clever script frames the drama around lawsuits against Zuckerberg, although in distancing itself from its difficult protagonist, the movie takes a few easy ways out.
Rated: PG-13 for language, subject matter
Showing: Alderwood mall, Cinebarre Mountlake Terrace, Everett, Galaxy Monroe, Marysville, Metro, Pacific Place, Thornton Place, Uptown, Woodinville, Cascade Mall
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