Flawed friend

I'm trying to make the world a more open place.

- Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg, 26, the founder of the world's biggest virtual community, Facebook - which connects more than 500 million members in 207 countries - is a reclusive, abrasive, rude, sarcastic, angry young man who'd rather write computer code than talk to another human being.

That, at least, is the Mark Zuckerberg we meet in the season's most highly anticipated Oscar contender, David Fincher's The Social Network, a tense, fast-moving, revelatory look at the prehistory of Facebook, which in seven years went from a dorm-room prank to a multibillion-dollar corporation. (In 2007 Facebook was valued at $15 billion, while Zuckerberg reportedly is worth $4 billion.)

"The great dramatic irony of the movie," says Jesse Eisenberg, who turns in an astounding performance as Zuckerberg, "is that this guy, who has trouble connecting with others in the traditional way, creates the greatest social networking tool in history."

The Social Network, which opens Friday, picks up Zuckerberg's story in 2003, when, as a Harvard sophomore, he came up with the idea for a site he called thefacebook, and recruited his best mate, Eduardo Saverin - who had earned $300,000 from his summer job - to fund him.

As played by the brilliant Anglo-American thesp Andrew Garfield, 27, the Brazilian-born Saverin is suave, sophisticated - and fiercely loyal. Alas, the friendship ends badly, giving screenwriter Aaron Sorkin the story's main conflict.

Infused by the West Wing creator's rapid-fire, sharply etched, witty, über-articulate style - which critics have dubbed Sorkin-speak - The Social Network jumps back and forth from those halcyon days to the legal conflict five years later, when Zuckerberg was sued by a cadre of his former Harvard pals.

Saverin sued for being pushed out of the company he helped found. (He was replaced by Napster cofounder Sean Parker, wonderfully portrayed by Justin Timberlake.)

The other suit was filed by blue-blood twins and Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), who claimed that Zuckerberg stole their idea for the site.

Facebook eventually settled both lawsuits.

Sorkin, 49, sits back in a banquet chair in a deserted meeting room at the Ritz-Carlton in Center City, where he is camped out with Eisenberg and Hammer for a round of press chats.

He says the film, partly based on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires, isn't so much about the technology behind Facebook or its social effects, as about the personal conflicts behind it.

"Even though Facebook is as modern an invention as there is, [its] story, I felt, was as old as storytelling itself," he says. "It had these themes of friendship and loyalty, power and class and jealousy. These things that Aeschylus would have written about, or Shakespeare or Paddy Chayefsky. Luckily for me, none of them were available."

Sorkin insists that while The Social Network is based on fact, including transcripts from both lawsuits, it does not pretend to offer an accurate portrayal of Zuckerberg.

"I have never met Mark, nor spoken to him," Sorkin says, "and I am in no way qualified to talk about the psyche of Mark - or, frankly, anyone else."

Zuckerberg recently told an interviewer "the movie is fiction."

In a clever move, Sorkin doesn't give his character a backstory: We know nothing about Zuckerberg's family or his past, which gives his story a mythic dimension.

Mythic he may be, but Zuckerberg isn't entirely likable. He's a complicated, conflicted soul. Sorkin says he's an antihero straining to become a tragic hero - a flawed person who tries to come to terms with his sins.

The film opens with an exhilarating, almost dizzying Hepburn-and-Tracy back-and-forth between Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Boston University undergrad Erica Albright (Rooney Mara).

Within seconds, the 19-year-old Zuckerberg drops hints that he has a "genius IQ" and that he aced the SATs.

Erica looks baffled, then uncomfortable, as her date drones on about his plans to get into Harvard's most exclusive final club.

She finally erupts in anger when Zuckerberg suggests matter-of-factly - and without a hint of disapproval - that she's dating him because of his higher social status. He says he'll introduce her to even better people once he's in the club.

"I think he genuinely doesn't understand why she would be so upset," says Eisenberg. "He never looks at how he affects people."

Eisenberg, 26, says that for Zuckerberg, relationships should follow the same logical rules as grammar or computer codes.

"He did the right thing by saying he was sorry. He followed the rules of grammar, so she should no longer be upset."

We're barely 15 minutes into the film and Zuckerberg further alienates the audience. Erica dumps him, and he reacts by writing a nasty, scathing attack on her in his personal blog. (Sorkin says he used the actual blog entry.)

Zuckerberg adds insult to injury when he creates Facesmash - an online game in which players rate Harvard's female students. (The game, in turn, inspired thefacebook.)

Is Zuckerberg really that heinous? Is he a misunderstood geek? Or a sadist and a misanthrope?

Hammer, 24, finds Zuckerberg's world hard to understand. "We're talking about kids, kids who never seem to have grown up," he says, "but who get to run multibillion-dollar corporations. . . . It seems like a very dangerous place, where all the wealthy and talented people are a bunch of children."

It's an apt description of Zuckerberg, who in real life carries business cards that read simply "I'm CEO - Bitch."

But it also describes Zuckerberg's Generation Z (GenZero?) peers, portrayed in the film as spoiled, power-hungry predators forever scheming to advance their social and professional standing.

Eisenberg says he can relate to Zuckerberg's inability to connect.

"I think he kind of views relationships in a way that's not dissimilar to Facebook, which rates people on the basis of checklists," he says.

It's friendship by stats.

"It's about amassing friends without really knowing them. I mean, knowing everybody's favorite band may give you the illusion of friendship," Eisenberg adds.

Sorkin says Eisenberg quickly allayed any fears he had about working with such a young cast.

"He's an extraordinary young man," Sorkin says of the Queens, N.Y., native.

"I always used to wonder to myself what it must have been like to be [Graduate writer] Buck Henry watching Dustin Hoffman do his scenes. . . . I don't wonder anymore."

Sorkin is loath to discuss what lessons we are to draw from the film. But he agrees that Facebook, the tool for sociality, ironically reflects Zuckerberg's antisocial orientation.

"For my generation, when a girl breaks up with you, you would go to your . . . friends, and they'll help you through it," he says. "When it happens to Mark . . . he goes to his computer and blogs to an anonymous, invisible group of people."

Sorkin says the hype around Facebook reminds him of some of the claims made during TV's infancy.

People felt TV "was something that was going to bring the whole world together. . . . It was going to end ignorance, it was going to end wars," he says.

"There's the same hope for . . . social networking. But I think that it's had the opposite effect."

Instead of creating vital relationships, Sorkin says, Facebook encourages users to play-act, to present insincere versions of themselves to impress others.

"Rather than bring us closer together," he says, "it's made us more like an anonymous mob."