Film review: The Social Network (12A)

There's a "geddit" in this movie as big as billionaire Mark Zuckerberg's bank balance. Namely, the man who created a whole new way of social interaction couldn't make or sustain a single friendship himself.

Geddit?

But, beyond the obvious, this is no easy pitch and the skill of the writer, director and actors is to turn away from the open goals of dramatic irony and quick-fix nostalgia and charge in the other direction.

Here we have a bunch of over-privileged, condescending, never-gonna-be-short-of-a-dime censorious Harvard alumni who have not between them a sympathetic bone in their milky-white bodies yet they hold us transfixed for two dense hours. Even coding seems like a sexy pastime in director David Fincher's hands.

And there's no smuggling in their narcissistic nastiness beneath twee youthful misunderstandings - it's right up front and blatant from the outset when Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), after he is deservedly dumped by his girlfriend, takes her down on his blog before figuring out how to indulge further misogynist fantasies.

The Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer), who originally commissioned Zuckerberg to set up a social networking site, are wronged.

But they're also blond-haired, rowing demi-gods from a multi-million-dollar family so who cares, right? Napster's Sean Parker just ramps up the hate factor by being so full of himself that only double stitching keeps his ego hemmed in.

Nevertheless this is riveting stuff. Writer and jargonaut Aaron Sorkin does it again, colonising an obscure foreign terrain (website creations) and decoding the new discoveries with a street smart nomenclature.

He opts for his favoured flashback technique as the former free-wheeling, high IQ dreamers face each other across a table, bodyguarded by lawyers, and swapping cruel revelations in exchange for a slice of the multi-million-pound Facebook pie.

Zuckerberg is less a figure than he should be for most of the film, pushed to the sidelines by the headline-grabbing charisma of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and flattened by the sweeping parabolic story arc of wronged coat-tailer Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield).

Mostly Zuckerberg is a bewitched victim, excluded by his clinical other-worldliness, capable of outsmarting the smartest guy in the room but so cripplingly bewitched and befuddled by the human touch that he falls under the spell of Parker's charisma believing he's the way to link likeability and loot.

Eisenberg puts us on notice that he's a thoughtful, Oscar-worthy talent but as the toxic lip and robotic sensibility that illuminates those early days gets submerged beneath beetle-browed distraction, it's Timberlake and Garfield who carry the honours.

Timberlake because he's rockin', louche and loud and Garfield - as the founder who gets elbowed aside - because he's the only one with anything close to a soul and a struggle (the latter creating the former).

Fincher gets to play with some neat lens work and piles on a throbbing soundtrack but his direction, in shades of corduroy brown, is background noise in a rat-a-tat talky piece that tells the first draft of history with all the broad-brushed flaws and brilliance of any such endeavour.

Add some LOLs and an OMG or two and this is SOAM (Something of a masterpiece).

– From October 2010