(2010) For the record, I don't have a Facebook account, nor have I ever visited anyone's Facebook profile. Also I think that more than Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest billionaire in the world, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks deserved Time's "Person of the Year" recognition. That said, I very much admired this admittedly fictionalized biopic of Zuckerberg, starring Jesse Eisenberg, from Aaron Sorkin's screenplay, based on Ben Mezrich's book, The Accidental Billionaires, directed by David Fincher.

The extremely brilliant are different from you and me. Also, as Marylin Delpy (Rashida Jones), a second-year associate with the California firm defending Zuckerberg from the lawsuit, says: "Creation myths need a Devil."

In the fall of 2003, after Boston University student Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) breaks up with Mark, a sophomore at Harvard, telling him that "Dating you is like dating a StairMaster," he posts on his blog, in addition to calling her a bitch: "Folks, for the record she may look like a 34D but she's getting all kinds of help from our friends at Victoria's Secret. She's a 34B, as in barely anything there. False advertising."

In his dorm room in Kirkland House, to distract himself from thinking about Erica, Mark creates in one night's programming Facemash, borrowing an algorithm for ranking chess players from his friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) to rank girls' "hotness" on the campus, which produces a sudden surge of traffic, crashing the university's network, garnering for himself a six-month academic probation for his having demonstrated gaps in the university's security system, and getting branded with a female fatwa.

Nevertheless, by making a strong impression on twin brothers Cameron (Armie Hammer) and Tyler Winklevoss (Josh Pence), scions of wealth and future crew-rowing Olympians, and their partner Divya Narendra, Mark's invited to help build their Harvard Connection website. Instead, he ignores their project for 42 days, while investing his time at inventing The Facebook, "taking the entire social experience about college and putting it online." More to the point, the concept revolves around guys meeting girls and getting laid.

For this the Winklevosses accuse him of stealing intellectual property, their idea for a website, to which Mark, during legal depositions, after pointing out his not having taken any of their code, sarcastically retorts: "If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook." Dismissive of their lack of intellectual and creative talent, he adds: "A guy who makes a nice chair doesn't owe money to everyone who has ever built a chair."

I felt little sympathy for the Winklevosses, who initially take the gentlemanly attitude that at Harvard "you don't sue people," even after they'd been curtly turned out of Larry Summer's office ("Yes, everyone at Harvard is inventing something," the Harvard president tells the brothers: "Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding one, so I'll suggest again that the two of you come up with a new new project"), largely taking Mark's side that for the first time things weren't working out the way the brothers wanted.

However, Wardo, co-founder and CFO, who initially financed Mark's start-up and launch of The Facebook with $19,000 of his own savings (as an undergraduate he'd invested $300,000 into the oil industry), eventually wins favoritism for the abuse he receives from Mark ("I was your only friend"). Eager to monetize the website, the economics major who'd been accepted into the exclusive Phoenix - S K Club, which raised a jealous wheal on Mark's heart toward his friend, is rebuffed by Zuckerberg's insistence that the website is "never finished" like fashions and must remain cool without advertising.

After their deliberate expansion of The Facebook to Yale, Columbia, and Stanford, Mark and Eduardo meet with Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), entrepreneur and co-founder of Napster, who takes a patronizing interest (discovering the website on Stanford co-ed Amelia "Amy" Ritter's computer) in the fledgling operation. "We don't need him," says Wardo, who sees in Parker a paranoid, delusional personality; but Sean's "billion-dollar" vision ("We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're gonna live on the internet!"), his anti-establishment swagger (suggesting a business card with "I'm CEO, bitch"), and ideas ("Drop the 'The.' Just Facebook. It's cleaner") appeal to Mark.

Taking Parker's advice to move to California for the summer, while Eduardo goes to New York for an internship, Mark blows through Wardo's funds as Facebook continues to grow, reaching into Oxford and Cambridge (where the Winklevosses are rowing for Harvard against Hollandia) and beyond. Upset with what he sees as Mark and Sean's profligacy, Saverin freezes the business account at the same time that Parker brings in angel investor Peter Thiel (Wallace Langham), co-founder of PayPal, of Clarium Capital with $500,000.

"He almost killed it," says Sean of Saverin, who returns to California to find his 34.4% share in the company has been diluted to a miniscule 0.03% along with loss of his standing as co-founder and CFO. He then sues Zuckerberg for $600 million.

Erica had informed Mark when she broke up with him: "You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." However, Ms Delpy offers a slightly kinder appraisal: "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be." As I stated at the outset, the extremely brilliant are different from you and me.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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