Every creation myth needs a devil.
I don't have a Facebook account. At least, I don't think I do. Sure, I signed up for one a few years back, but I never really did all that much with it. I didn't upload any photos, I didn't write any blog entries (that's what LiveJournal is for), I didn't use it to keep in touch with anybody. Periodically I would get a friend request from an extended family member or someone I knew in high school (and hadn't had any contact with since), but those were few and far between. Eventually I decided to get rid of my account, so I logged on one last time to deactivate it, but then I discovered that deactivating an account didn't actually get rid of it, so I logged back on to delete it. All I had to do after that was avoid Facebook for two weeks and the deed would be done. Easy peasy, right? Not quite.
Before the two weeks were up, I received an e-mail from Facebook thanking me for reactivating my account. I had, of course, done no such thing, so I went back on the site and went through the whole rigamarole of deleting my account all over again, only I went one step further and deleted all my friends and contacts first. This time, only a day or two went by before I received another e-mail thanking me for reactivating my account. Clearly Facebook didn't want to let me go, so I logged back in one last time (for real this time) and changed all of my basic information so the account that remained would be completely useless to anybody for marketing purposes. I also added Facebook to my spam filter, so any further e-mails from them went right in the dumper which is where they belong. So when I say I don't have a Facebook account, that's technically true -- unless I happen to be a 103-year-old Inuit fisherman (or whatever the hell I said I was).
If you haven't already figured it out, I'm not the biggest Facebook fan in the world, so when I first saw the trailer for The Social Network some months back I wasn't all that enthused about it, despite the involvement of director David Fincher (whose Zodiac greatly impressed me, even if The Curious Case of Benjamin Button smelled so much like Oscar bait that I could nose it from several theaters away). As the release date got closer, though, the advance word got better and when the reviews came in this past weekend they were almost universally glowing, so the film got bumped onto my "must-see" list. And I'm glad I saw it because it is, without a doubt, one of the best films I've seen all year. It's just too bad I can't log onto Facebook and change my status to "just got back from seeing the Facebook movie... it rocked!!!"
Anyway, the film was written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin, who based it on The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal by Ben Mezrich. Most of the story plays out in a series of flashbacks during a lengthy deposition where Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) faces two separate lawsuits, one of which claims he stole the idea for Facebook from some Harvard classmates and the other that he screwed over his best friend and co-founder in the process. Andrew Garfield plays the friend, who puts up the initial seed money for the website and eventually finds himself shut out of the company, and the wronged classmates are played by Armie Hammer (as identical twin rowers) and Max Minghella (as their business partner). The one who gets the ball rolling, though, is Zuckerberg's girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara), who dumps him in the opening scene (and takes the opportunity to call him out for being an asshole) because he's obsessed with getting into one of Harvard's exclusive "final clubs." Failing that, he decides to start his own -- after a fashion.
I won't go into too much detail about how the story develops from there -- after all, it's based on fairly recent history -- but I will say that Justin Timberlake gets high marks for his role as Napster founder Sean Parker, who elbows his way into the company (and elbows Garfield out). I also enjoyed watching John Getz in action as Zuckerberg's lawyer and Rashida Jones as an associate from his firm observing the deposition. Behind the scenes, I can't say enough good things about the work of cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (son of the late Jordan Cronenweth) and the film features an effective electronic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which I'll have to see about picking up on CD. In many ways, that's the highest compliment I can pay to a film short of buying it on DVD. That I won't be able to do for a least a few months, though.