Nice work, Zuck!

The Social Network

12A, Nationwide

The Social Network is a brilliantly entertaining and fascinating film about a subject in which I have absolutely no interest: Facebook. I could be no more surprised if, say, someone were to make a brilliantly entertaining and fascinating film about fish-gutting or car-tuning or being put on hold by the bank before finally being put through to someone you can’t understand. (I am thinking of outsourcing myself to Bombay, just to be similarly annoying.) But this hurtles along so smartly and masterfully the subject sweeps you up as does its main, knotty character: a man who cares nothing for money yet makes zillions while losing his only friend in the process. The Social Network may be the Citizen Kane of our digitised age and you are welcome to quote me on that, just as you are welcome to poke me on that. (I won’t know. I don’t do Facebook. Why would I want 733 friends? I had one for real once, but this proved fantastically irritating, so I got rid. )

Actually, this film is not about the social networking site per se, which now has 500 million users, can attract more traffic than Google and always laughs when you try to tighten up your privacy settings, or so I’ve heard. It’s about its beginnings and, in particular, Mark ‘Zuck’ Zuckerberg, the Harvard sophomore who, at 19, founded Facebook in his dorm and was a billionaire by the time he was in his early twenties. Nice work, Zuck! Directed by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club, Panic Room and then, curiously, the utterly horrible The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), scripted by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and based on the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, this operates in the Peter Morgan zone; that is, it takes what is factually known about living persons and fills in the rest.