Ok, read the screenplay on the internet, saw the movie. So it was skilfully done and very entertaining. Nice job Sorkin, nice job Fincher. Jesse Eisenberg taking on the mantle of that brilliant-but-socially-blind-but-still-capable-of-great-friendship-and-hurt character did great. The story is a defense of how genius alienates and can lose touch with the heart. Check. Kind of like Citizen Kane, only here someone steps in at the end and says to Charles Foster Kane, you're not an asshole, you just want to be one and salvages a hopeful happy ending from the jaws of tragedy. Of course it's different, because while Zuckerberg is portrayed as driven and somehow charismatic in a new way the world has never known, yet he is also shy with autistic shading. Great snappy dialogue, observation of the zeitgeist pretty good (although I wonder how Harvard-as-newest colony in the Aryan Nation really corresponds to reality). It's less of an amusement park ride than I thought it might be before reading the script, but it's a ride nonetheless, in that it does not perforate into the real world of real live human beings, but comfortably hides behind the "spectacular monied success or failure", "asshole or not an asshole" as the main dramatic questions. Maybe little drama, truth be told, plumbs much farther than that, but Sorkin sets out with the firm credo that it properly cannot, and that the only thing workable is to grow up and realize that and make good stories within that box. He once said any screenwriter who thinks his characters somehow have "lives" beyond what's on the page is delusional. Of course he's right in one sense, wrong in another. And for his adhering faithfully to that "declaration of principles" I think he has made the Social Network a great social document, not a great movie.
p.s. – interesting deletion on screen from the screenplay. there is a scene where Sean Parker sets up Zuckerberg in a revenge ploy toward his own former nemesis the VC Mike Moritz, instructing him, once Facebook is taking off and investors are begging onboard, to take a meeting with Moritz and tell him to fuck off. Zuckerberg agrees to do it, and while the scene isn't shown it is presumed to happen offscreen. The setup of that scene was deleted, clearly because it overly complicates Zuckerberg's character and makes him less sympathetic. Was it Fincher who cut that? Did they shoot it? Interesting because the calculation was that they would have lost some of the audience, who needs a very simple throughline on Zuckerberg to follow in order to keep loving him. Thought experiment: Imagine the script being made by Cassavetes. Or more realistically Mike Nichols–ok, say the Mike Nichols of Carnal Knowledge. Not only not deleting that scene, but elaborating on it and doing mischief withe script. Then, maybe a movie for the ages…
p.p.s. – to be fair, reality tugs at the movie in much more insistent way than documentary truth about Hearst troubled Mankiewicz, who in fact delighted in the arch pastiche of it and had a personal axe to grind too.