The Social Network, which tells one possibly, sort-of-true version of the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook, could easily have been a folly or even a large-scale disaster. Instead Fincher and his screenwriter, TV writer-god Aaron Sorkin, have made a seemingly modest picture that achieves something close to greatness the old-fashioned, slow-burning way: By telling a story with faces, dialogue and body language of all types, from awkward to swaggering. It also does the unthinkable: In a climate where many of us feel compelled to advertise our ever-changing moods, our hopefully not-so-ever-changing relationship status, our "what we're up to now" scheduling minutiae, The Social Network slows down the clock, just for the space of a few hours, to ask, "Why?"
The Social Network opens in 2003, as Jesse Eisenberg's Zuckerberg sits in a noisy Boston-area club with his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara, who's terrific, and terrifically pointed, in her two brief scenes). Zuckerberg, a Harvard undergrad, is trying to explain to Erica, a lowly (in Harvard terms) Boston University student, how important it is for him to get into one of Harvard's prestigious clubs. The more Erica tries to assuage his fears of not getting in, the more aggressively and, worse yet, absent-mindedly, he tears her down. "Dating you is like dating a StairMaster," she tells him, an early zinger in a movie filled with them. But eventually Zuckerberg's clueless cruelty wears her down (among other things, he tells her she doesn't need to study. Why? "Because you go to B.U."). She leaves the table and she leaves him, prompting him to go back to his room in a funk, talk trash about her on his blog, and then, as his anti-woman-huff gathers steam, go on to invent the most explosive social-networking tool of the admittedly young 21st century.
In the first 10 minutes of his movie, Fincher shoots down the conventional wisdom that nerds and geeks are all really nice guys, just aching for a girl to give them a chance. Zuckerberg is, as Erica puts it plainly in the movie's first scene, an asshole, and through the course of the movie he will be nothing but: The Social Network isn't about grand transformation; it's about stubborn, old-fashioned emotional stasis. Technology changes by the day; in the Fincher/Sorkin version of the Facebook story, Zuckerberg doesn't change at all.
The Social Network is based only roughly on Ben Mezrich's recently published The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding Of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal. In interviews (most notably the one he gave to Mark Harris, in New York Magazine) Sorkin has said there are multiple stories here, and instead of fixating solely on Zuckerberg's, he's woven together the stories of several secondary players, including those of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the Olympic rowing champs -- and twins! -- who had sought Zuckerberg's help in building an exclusive Harvard matchmaking site and who eventually brought a lawsuit against them for stealing his idea. An even bigger and more piercing presence in the Fincher/Sorkin version is Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg's best friend at Harvard, who put up seed money for "The Facebook" (as it was originally called) and was later edged out in a bit of ruthless but not atypical contractual wheeler-dealing. (Saverin also sued Zuckerberg, reportedly regaining a large chunk of his ownership in a settlement.)
Sorkin and Fincher tell their version of the story by cutting between the early, heady days of Zuckerberg's enterprise and the more somber, later era (really just a few years later), in which the players sit around an oblong table in a law office somewhere, glaring at one another as they give (or, in Zuckerberg's case, pretty much refuse to give) their depositions. Saverin is played by Andrew Garfield, who's equal parts trusting, smooth and awkward -- at one point in his escalating frustration during their student years, he asks Zuckerberg, "How do you do this thing where you manage to get all the girls to hate us?"
The well-heeled, golden-boy Winklevosses -- or the "Winklevi," as Zuckerberg archly calls them -- are played by one actor, Armie Hammer, who brings both an air of gentlemanly breeding and gentle self-satire to these dual roles. The Winklevosses' wedge-shaped bodies appear to come complete with wedge-shaped brains -- they just can't believe they could ever come out on the wrong side of any equation -- and in one of the movie's funniest and sharpest scenes, they trek into the office of an eye-rolling Lawrence Summers (played, wonderfully, by Douglas Urbanski) to assert that by stealing from them, Zuckerberg has broken not just state and federal laws, but Harvard law.
A fourth and more sinister player in this little tale of Internet intrigue is Sean Parker, the wily playboy founder of Napster, played by Justin Timberlake: He's Beelzebub in skinny lapels. But just as all of these players are satellites in the Zuckerberg story, all of these performers cluster around the movie's weirdly magnetic center: Jesse Eisenberg's performance.
Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg as a willful naif, a guy with zero social skills who sees no reason to develop any. He struts around campus in baggy getups that are always accessorized, even in winter, with athletic flip-flops. (When it's cold, he bows to practicality by adding a pair of thick white socks.) Young Zuckerberg's exact layer in the social strata is never specified, but it's clear that class insecurity plays some part in his overall, if you'll pardon the coined expression, assholery. And as Eisenberg plays him, we also sense that there might be some chemical or neurological misfiring: An Aspergery remoteness kicks in whenever Zuckerberg is faced with someone who craves a genuine, emotional response from him.
I can't remember the last time I loved such a defiantly unlikable performance. Eisenberg has a nerdily angelic face -- his lips are so red, they look as if he's been sucking on cherry Popsicles. But there's nothing sweet about this performance: In his eyes, we mostly see calculation and a businesslike reckoning of where he stands -- with everyone -- at any given moment. Occasionally, when he's forced to confront another character's pain or anger, a flicker of confusion will cross his brow, the way a mixed-up dog will hesitate before he bites. I'm not quite sure how Eisenberg -- formerly the gangly, sympathetic hero of movies like The Squid and the Whale and Adventureland -- channels this kind of befuddled darkness. And while it's tempting to frame The Social Network as a modern-age Citizen Kane, what's perhaps most remarkable about Eisenberg's performance is how close he holds us even as he exerts almost negative charisma. He's no Orson Welles. So why is it you can't take your eyes off him?
Fincher clearly knows what he's got here. The Social Network is a trim, taut piece of work. In terms of technical dazzle, it's Fincher's most modest movie yet. It may also be his greatest: He has perhaps reached a point where he has nothing to prove, which is precisely when many filmmakers start doing their best work. The picture sails by, fast, on Sorkin's brainy, colloquial dialogue. But even though there are no grand set pieces or ambitious tracking shots, I think it's dangerous to assert, as I'm sure people will, that The Social Network isn't cinematic. It's cinematic in the way All the President's Men is: You always want to know where these characters are headed next, what they're going to do and say. Fincher keeps up with them every moment: Too many clever camera angles or novelty cutting would only get in his way. That means the crisp simplicity of Jeff Cronenwerth's cinematography and Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall's editing has to speak for itself, and it does.
In the amorphous world of pre-release online chatter, I've heard The Social Network being called Old Media's attack on the New. At the New York Film Festival press conference last week, both Sorkin and Fincher admitted that they don't use Facebook themselves, and in that New York Magazine article, Sorkin groused, in a good-natured rant, "I have to tell you, I don't feel like I had any trouble getting information before [the Internet]. Every morning two newspapers were literally thrown at my house. All I had to do was open the door and get them."
But The Social Network is anti-New Media the same way that, say, Philip Roth is anti-woman -- which is to say, it isn't. The Social Network is obsessed with New Media, turning over stone after quiet stone in parsing what it means in our world, and what we want it to mean in our world. I saw The Social Network at a New York Film Festival press screening, a place where you'd expect a degree of seriousness and good manners among people who are supposedly colleagues. But in the last 15 minutes of the movie, just as the picture was hurtling toward its somewhat abrupt and wholly effective ending, the woman next to me took out her PDA, set it alight and started scrolling. She'd done this earlier, briefly, and I'd kept silent. This time, I asked her politely if she'd please turn it off. She ignored me for 10 seconds before saying, flatly, "No."
I apologize to Fincher and Sorkin for missing 30 seconds of their movie, in which I leaned in very closely toward this woman (stopping just short of risking an assault charge) and began reading her screen over her shoulder: "Wow, that's really interesting," I said in something louder than a stage whisper. "Gee, what else you got going on there?"
She eventually turned the thing off, but the bitch had already made her point -- although inadvertently, she'd made Fincher's and Sorkin's points too. The Social Network is the first movie I've seen that really grapples, even indirectly, with the question of what we risk if we let restless online pursuits rule our lives. It's wrong and misguided to hold Zuckerberg responsible for too many of society's ills. (I don't use Facebook myself, but I know tons of people who find delight and pleasure in it. Plus, I've been making my living in New Media for nearly a dozen years.) But it's safe to say he's added yet one more distraction that threatens our ability to live in the moment. The Social Network makes one unconflicted demand: It asks you to be alive to what's in front of you for the space of its lean, wholly engaging two hours. One screen at a time ought to be enough, and the one you choose at a given moment says everything about you.