The Social Network

One of cinema’s great­est strengths is that it can make the ordi­nary and mun­dane excit­ing and adven­tur­ous. It’s a rare thing though, and when you see it, some­times it’s dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out how it hap­pened. In the case of The Social Net­work there’s no trick.

Build­ing a web­site can be slow, tedious work in the real world, but David Finch­er turns it into cin­e­mat­ic dyna­mite through pure, joy­ous storytelling.

The details of Facebook’s gen­e­sis are well known. Zucker­berg and his pals start­ed ​‘The Face­book’ at Har­vard, before drop­ping out and mov­ing to Cal­i­for­nia full time to build the com­pa­ny. Along the way sev­er­al peo­ple feel ripped off/​mistreated by Zucker­beg (the Win­klevoss twins and Eduar­do Saverin, Zuckerberg’s friend and a founder of Face­book), the site attracts around 500 mil­lion users and Zucko, at age 21, becomes the youngest ever billionaire.

From the very first scene, the film sets off at a rac­ing pace to tell this sto­ry and it flips quick­ly through time, focus­ing on dif­fer­ent play­ers in Zuckerberg’s rise or, more accu­rate­ly, the rise of Face­book. More than any­thing else it becomes clear that Zucker­berg is Face­book. It’s his pas­sion, his life and his sole focus. As this real­i­sa­tion dawns, the focus of the film changes ever so sub­tly, and the moti­va­tion com­plex for this ded­i­ca­tion is revealed as The Social Network’s real heart.

Play­ing a real per­son who is still alive is often a thank­less task, with the capac­i­ty for epic fail­ure, but Jesse Eisenberg’s approach is fear­less and he nails a num­ber of Zuckerberg’s more famous man­ner­isms – indif­fer­ence to oth­ers (you’re nev­er sure if it’s feigned or gen­uine), the fast rate of speech and the social awk­ward­ness. Any rep­u­ta­tion Eisen­berg has among snooty film cir­cles as a poor man’s Shia LaBeouf is dis­missed with lines like: ​“If you guys were the inven­tors of Face­book, you’d have invent­ed Facebook.”

Such remarks are sim­ple but strik­ing­ly effec­tive in the hands of Eisen­berg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Tim­ber­lake, who excels as the ener­getic but slight­ly smug and creepy Sean Park­er. The his­to­ry of pop stars-turned-actors is filled with far more miss­es than hits, but Tim­ber­lake real­ly looks like he’s the excep­tion and an emerg­ing act­ing talent.

And that’s how it’s done: get great actors, get a dev­as­tat­ing screen­play – cour­tesy of West Wing scribe Aaron Sorkin – get a gift­ed direc­tor and tell a bril­liant sto­ry. This is a look at what it takes to become suc­cess­ful, not a lit­tle bit, but mind-blowl­ing­ly, once-in-a-life­time suc­cess­ful. The type of suc­cess that changes the world.

The Social Net­work may not have the impact on the world that Face­book has, but when the sto­ry is told this well, it doesn’t have to.