Brilliantly connects the universal themes of friendship and betrayal with the tech obsessed 21st Century generation

The Social Network: Life in bits and bytes

You would think that there wouldn’t be much to play around with in the telling of a straight forward tale of how another super geek invented the next big thing on the Internet. But “The Social Network,” which traces the founding story of Facebook (by miles the most popular social networking website), in the hands of two masterful craftsmen in director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, zings with emotional intensity and wry wit. It captures not only the characters and the emotions of those who were associated with Facebook but also the zeitgeist of a generation.

The origins of Facebook, it would appear, were mired in a lot of sex, lies and coding scripts. In the fall of 2003, Jessica Albright (Rooney Mara) breaks up with the socially awkward but brilliant Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), and an angry and inebriated Mark gets back to his dorm room desperately looking for something to take his mind off her. In a rage filled bout of coding he manages to hack into the online student directories of practically every Harvard dorm and uses the data to create Facemash.com, a website where the photos of two students can be compared by users to decide who’s hotter. The website goes viral, crashes servers at Harvard, and Mark has a brainwave about a social networking website. He discusses the idea with his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and gets him to financially support his newly launched website and thus is born the facebook.com. Things would have been pretty fine for Mark at this point had he not promised to help three other students – twins
Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (Armie Hammer plays both) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella) – with coding on a website with a similar idea. When thefacebook.com goes live, the twins are livid and finally sue Mark.

The story is told in flashback from the depositions in the cases against Zuckerberg in 2007, with a Rashomon like narrative device where parts of the story are recounted from different characters’ point of view. It works like a dream because all the while the tale keeps moving forward. The dialogue is sharp, biting and fast and the acting is brilliant. Eisenberg fantastically encapsulates the discomfort, disdain and the dislike the uber geek feels when dealing with mere mortals, while Andrew Garfield delivers a tour de force as the loyal and caring friend who becomes roadkill in Facebook’s rush towards the big time. But the one to watch out for is Justin Timberlake, who plays the role of maverick Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker (of ‘Napster’ fame) to perfection. As the man who drives the wedge between the friendship of Zuckerberg and Saverin, Parker’s role requires a certain sophistication and impishness and Timberlake nails it.

“The Social Network” does much more than just tell how Facebook came into being; it also poignantly illustrates the frustration of a whole generation in coming to terms with itself

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