Film Review: The Social Network (Director: David Fincher)

There are many indicators that can help decide on the quality of a film. One of the more reliable ones is this: You sit in the theatre, the closing credits start rolling and you're surprised because you're thinking not much more than an hour could have passed. Instead, it's been two hours. When this happens, it's usually not too bad a sign. The Social Network, Davis Fincher's fictionalized account of the foundation of Facebook, one of the greatest business success stories of our young century, is such a film.

It starts with a two minute tour de force: Mark Zuckerberg sits in a café with Erica, a girl he is dating. A discussion about his desire to enter one of Harvard's exclusive clubs ands in a war of words and the girl breaking up with him. Not before telling him that even though he may thing girls didn't like him because he was a nerd, that's not the reason: They don't like him because he is an a**hole, she says.

With this hilarious and yet disturbing fast-paced scene, the film starts as if it's kicking in a door. It also perfectly characterizes Mark Zuckerberg as we will get used to him in the next two hours: as a complex-ridden, ambitious, jealous, totally self-conscious character who bites when he feels attacked - especially those closest to him. Thus it is with Erica and thus ist is with his best freiend and Facebook co-founder Eduardo, who he will betray later.

And so it is no coincidence that the film not only starts with a sequence of events that gets him into trouble with the university and its female student but that it centers on two lawsuits against him from which the story is told in flashbacks. From here the story unfurls like a murder mystery - made even stronger by the fact that it's "only" the story of an IT company. It is a story of betrayal and hurt pride - set in a world of money, sex and drugs to which, strangely, the center of the storm, the villain of the piece is mostly immune. Zuckerberg want recognition more than money, self-affirmation more than sex or billions of dollars. maybe this is what sets him up as a target - for those feeling done wrong by him and those who try to use him as a toy. In the end, he comes out - not unharmed, not loved, but his own man, in a way.

The lawsuits play an interesting role too: There is the serious suits brought on by the betrayed friend Eduardo and its farcical counterpart initiated by affluent snobs thinking he stole their idea. The two proceedings shed light on each other and together create a picture so complex that in the end an easy condemnation is hard to get to.

Much of this is due to an excellent cast: Jesse Eisenberg is breathtaking as the over-confident yet vulnerable, love-seeking yet wounding, arrogant and lonesome Zuckerberg, Andrew Garfield is the honest, naive and proud Eduardo, Justin Timberlake the pompous and maipulating Sean Parker.

The result is a fast-paced, brilliantly structure thriller, as serious and deep as it is hilariously funny, full of fully threedimensional characters that does so much more that shed a light on an industry still underrepresented in Hollywood - it sheds a light on what it means to be a totally imperfect human being trying to figure out what this thing called life actually means. And maybe its greatest achievement is that it reserves judgement on its "villaint". "You're not an a**hole", another woman says at the end. "You're just trying too hard to act like one." Who can tell who is right?