Food for the brain

Rating: 9/10 (17 October 2010)

I really enjoyed this film. It is something of a rarity, in that it is aimed at the part of the brain which involves thinking, not the parts which involve feeling, or enjoying eye candy, or visceral reactions etc.
I have to approach it as if it was a work of fiction as I'm not able to assess the extent to which it uses dramatic licence in telling which is otherwise the true story behind the creation of Facebook.
Two things drive it. One is the two legal actions deriving from the creation of Facebook together with the actual gestation (told simultaneously in flashback), and the other is the interactions between the main characters involved, principally Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), his partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), the predatory Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (Armie Hammer). Both are presented masterfully by director David Fincher.
If there is a weakness here, it is that (with the possible exception of Saverin) none of the characters are particularly sympathetic. But that doesn't matter too much because the story is sufficiently interesting to survive that. In particular, Timberlake delivers a character who is unpleasant and amoral, but nonetheless very three dimensional, and Eisenberg - previously a charter member of the self-deprecating loser fraternity - is simply phenomenal, playing a character whose interaction with others takes place almost exclusively on intellectual, not emotional terms. He is aware that there are such things as social niceties, it is just that he is completely unequipped to access them.
And a quick word of praise for the special effects. What special effects, you may ask. Quite. In most of the scenes in which the Winklevoss twins appear, they are both played by Armie Hammer, and the inclusion of the actor twice in the same scene is absolutely flawless. And there are quite a few such scenes. Brilliant.