THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: David Fincher
Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer,
Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara, Barry Livingston
This movie about Mark Zuckerberg, the Harvard computer geek who created Facebook, starts out with Zuckerberg and his girlfriend drinking beer in an off-campus bar. They talk for a couple of minutes, and then she dumps him, not because he's a nerd, but because he's an asshole. You can see what she means. Zuckerberg might be a whiz at crafting computer code, but he has the psychological makeup of a 12-year-old. Zuckerberg leaves the bar and dashes home, where he gets drunk and exacts a little on-line revenge, which leads to an idea that will make him the world's youngest billionaire. Aaron Sorkin's script raises some interesting questions about intellectual property rights and the blinding speed at which cybertechnology evolves, but the main focus is on Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg as a baby-faced monster, a disturbingly amoral combination of intelligence, ego and spite. The movie ends with Zuckerberg on his laptop, logged on to Facebook, looking for a "friend," the question at that point being whether the guy who brought about the most pervasive social network ever has a single real friend in the world. The answer appears to be no.
