The Social Network **** (2010, Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara, Joseph Mazzello, Josh Pence) – Classic Movie Review 586

Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield star as Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, the sickeningly far-too brainy Harvard duo who start up the social-networking website Facebook together but end up falling out and fighting each other in court.

With ideal performances from a hand-picked cast, smart direction and a sizzling screenplay by The West Wing’s resident genius Aaron Sorkin (based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires), this triple Oscar-winning 2010 movie is brilliant, edgy, clever drama. And it is handled in the most ultra-smooth, slick and professional of ways by director David Fincher.

It is tricky for Eisenberg that he has to conceal his natural appealing persona playing a smug and conceited ‘a*****e’, a cheat and a liar who gleefully betrays his best friend and steals his Harvard colleague’s ideas. Though you inevitably lose sympathy for Zuckerberg, Eisenberg does the role extremely well, judging it finely and holding the movie’s centre together.

Garfield gives an appealing, perky and earnest performance as the victim, his business partner, while Justin Timberlake makes quite a flamboyant impression as the villain of the piece, cynical Napster founder Sean Parker, who attracts Zuckerberg away from his pal Saverin, causing all the legal troubles but also causing Facebook to happen as a world phenomenon.

Armie Hammer gives eye-catching splashy turns in his breakout role as the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, Harvard’s 6′ 5″ aristocratic rowers, who recruit Zuckerberg to help their college network website and end up being betrayed and suing him too.

Josh Pence is credited in the cast list as playing Tyler Winklevoss, but his face is altered to make him look like Armie Hammer’s twin. He also has a uncredited cameo as the guy who tries to enter a bathroom while Mark and Eduardo are blocking the door.

It is a great subject for a film, with excellent results in a riveting movie. Although, despite all David Fincher’s smart, polished direction and Sorkin’s bravura script, it doesn’t quite overcome the idea that it could just as easily be a TV movie, though admittedly a stupendous one.

Sorkin won the most deserved Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won for Best Original Score and there was a third for Best Film Editing.

Also in the cast are Rooney Mara as Erica Albright, Joseph Mazzello as Dustin Moskovitz, Max Minghella as Divya Narendra and David Selby as Gage.

It was a fairly costly movie at $40 million, but an encouraging big box-office success for a serious film, taking just under $100 million in the US.

Sorkin went on to write the screenplay for Steve Jobs in 2015.

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© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 586

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