When we first meet Andrew Garfield's character Eduardo Saverin, he asks his best (and virtually only) friend Mark how he's doing. He had read his blog post that he had broken up with his girlfriend that night, and he assures Mark that he's there for him. This sets up the character of Eduardo, whom Aaron Sorkin introduces in the script as "a sweet looking Brazilian sophomore who almost always wears a three-piece suit." It is safe to conclude that Sorkin draws him as easily the most sympathetic character in his behemoth achievement of screenwriting, regardless of whether or not you believe his side is right or wrong. The case could very easily be made that his side is wrong, or perhaps simply undeserving of the hefty cash settlement his character likely received. Frankly, he was naïve; he tackled a revolutionary and visionary concept with old-fashioned and traditional business methods he had picked up in his Harvard education. He couldn't comprehend the capacity of facebook's potential nor it's viral nature. Thus, as Mark had warned, he got left behind.
Andrew Garfield's performance leaves room for such judgments to be made. He allows himself to be imperfect — extraordinary in his own right, but human enough to have flaws like any other. His Eduardo is brimming with humanity, bursting at the seams with love, affection, self-conscious insecurity, desire, envy, possessiveness, puerility, motivation, and some social ineptitude. Any actor could have coasted to a great performance with the character offered by Sorkin's script, but it's Andrew Garfield who takes charge to make Eduardo as fleshed out living, breathing, and humane character on every level possible. He ultimately takes the character of Eduardo from written to wholly emotional, and he does so with a searing realism. He disappears under this character with ease. Some have even said that where Jesse Eisenberg is William H. Macy delivering the distinctly wordy dialogue of David Mamet with a Shakespearean cadence where it concerns Sorkin's screenplay, that Andrew Garfield is Al Pacino in Glengarry Glen Ross — reading off the trademark dialogue in a way that still sounds wholly his own and that you'd attribute strictly to the character more than its inceptor.
That is to both of their credit. Andrew Garfield's performance wouldn't work without Jesse Eisenberg's to play against. We need to see Saverin's offer of love and support in the beginning of the movie to be met with Mark's cold dismissiveness. We need to see Eduardo time and time again reach out emotionally to Mark with little in return. One could theoretically assert that Eduardo is actually in love with Mark, who does not share his affection. At least, that's to the extent to which we see Eduardo lend his whole love and his whole self to Mark with a devotion and trust that make his end betrayal particularly heartbreaking. This is evidenced the petty bitterness and jealousy that he venomously directs at Justin Timberlake's Shaun Parker when he manages to capture Mark's heart and full attention. Attention that Eduardo craves. The warmth Garfield instills in Eduardo is crucially contrasted by the cruel coldness in Eisenberg's Mark, which also makes the latter much more in tune and connected to the idea of facebook than the former ever understands (he as a co-founder doesn't even know how to change items of his profile like his relationship status).
This unrequited love Eduardo feels for Mark gets down to a central insecurity and vulnerability that Garfield portrays with a delicate bravura that required to put all of himself out there, his portrayal of a friend wanting so much more emotional satisfaction out of his relationship that probably confronts some unsettling truths among many halves of such friendships. And he does so with such a devoted strength that you could pick up on cues in his subtle physicality throughout the film. He's drawn into Mark's ultimate betrayal to begin with because of a phone conversation that has Mark ending up being so friendly and open to Eduardo (to a suspicious extent) that has Garfield smiling from ear to ear, even after the scolding he had received from Mark for immaturely freezing his business account. It's an attitude and they are words that he's been longing to hear from his best friend directed at him. He then confidently shows up in California and signs the contracts without the slightest inkling that his friend had just betrayed him and ultimately kicked him out of the company at the likely urging of Shaun Parker's corrupting influence.
Garfield puts forth much of his physical self throughout the film, in fact, and in a way that informs to emotions that pent up inside his character throughout the film's duration. Garfield is very much informed by the past of Eduardo, who is a Brazilian immigrant raised in Miami and became educated enough to be in Harvard. You can hear it distinctly in the impressive dialect Garfield dons for his accent, and in the general rhythm of how he carries himself. It's hard to describe, but having several Brazilian American friends, I can attest to this general aura that Garfield mysteriously nails in a way that's authentic and believable. He additionally forms his character in other ways; in the way he moves, when he awkwardly inches towards Mark in a dance wearing a Caribbean islander hat, when he shoves his hands as deep into his pockets as possible, when we shift to the present day court proceedings where Eduardo's broken heart can't even stand to take one look at Mark. Sign of a true master of his craft, he manipulates his body in a way that both subtly paints a nuanced portrait of his characters but also elicits an emotional response from the audience necessary in their experience of the film.
For instance, when Eduardo first shows up in California. Shaun barely notices the door knocks but opens it to find Eduardo drenched in the rain, ready to turn back to his taxi. He looks at Shaun with the puppy dog eyes that Garfield employs for the first time that communicate his sea of pain and hurt. Expecting to see his best and only friend, he sees the man who may have very well taken that away from him. The salt is added to the wounds the audience feels when it's revealed that Mark was meant to pick Eduardo up at the airport an hour prior, but he essentially forgot about him and left him alone in the pouring rain. Slowly he unravels his levels of stress in New York City trying to find investors, aggravated that Mark hadn't remembered when he told him he dropped his planned internship months prior (or perhaps hadn't listened). He says he's scared of his girlfriend, and he's coming to see how much Mark hadn't told him about their progress with facebook. Even then Mark is hardly listening, and this starts to snowball into what will become an avalanche of suppressed emotional pain for Eduardo into the film's climax.
The Social Network as a film has, as a central credit, a consistent pace that keeps you on your feet and keeps your ears on the ready. But, easily, the most exhilarating and compelling scene is, understandably, the climax, where Eduardo Saverin unleashes his fury upon Mark and Shaun and plans for his wrath, which just happens to be in the form of one of the two court cases at the center of the film. It's the clearest marriage of Sorkin's writing, Fincher's direction and the ensemble's acting, starting from when our jaws drop to the floor when it is revealed to us how much Eduardo's shares had dwindled down to by facebook's one millionth member. Arguably, though, it's Andrew Garfield who takes center stage. He goes to that unspeakable place for an actor that separates the greats from the greatests when, in a rage, his character delves into what I would dub 'emotional chaos.' We sense this earthquake coming as Eduardo glides towards Mark, yelling his name, and slams his laptop into this explosive supernova of pure and unadulterated anger — informed by the new contract. Informed by stress of his life in New York City and in his relationship. Informed by the jealousy that Shaun Parker had hijacked the company he worked with Mark to get off the ground. Informed by the purity of love that he time and time again blanketed upon Mark, his truest and best and virtually only friend, who turned out to betray all of that on such a monumental scale. Your eyes are glued to the scene. His delivery of the scene's closing line easily makes for the most invigorating and most bad-ass line delivery of the year: "You better lawyer up, asshole, because I'm not coming back for the 30%. I'm coming back for everything." Empire Magazine's on-set report chronicled this climactic moment, including a tidbit that Garfield, per instruction from David Fincher, had leaned in to Eisenberg's ear before shooting that scene and sharply hissed, "you're a fucking dick and you betrayed your best fucking friend. Live with that." The article goes on to describe the atmosphere the day that scene was shot, giving sense of the grueling method where Fincher demands as many takes as possible of the same scene, which the actors find liberating at times but is challenging of a scene requiring this much energetic emotion. "Under strip-lighting, amid desks and cool Cali-kid extras, Garfield has spent 90 minutes in an emotional maelstrom. Snatching and smashing. Snatching and smashing. Snatching and smashing. At 12.45 a.m. on a Friday in December 2009 - day 34 of the 70-day shoot, take 10 of this set-up - Fincher shouts across, ‘Andrew, disintergrate it! The computer: disintergrate it!’ It is a bastard hard scene: bringing rage and hurt again and again and again. Garfield, in dapper dark suit and perfect US accent, is excellent, but drained. After stumbling over the same word one too many times, he bellows an expletive. Eventually, 25 Apples will be obliterated. At 5.05 a.m., the various set-ups are exhausted, as is Garfield, when Fincher offers blessed words - ‘Cut it! Movin’ on’ - and shakes his hand. Garfield calls out to the crew, ‘Sorry if I was an asshole!’ He wasn’t. He was human. That’s what Fincher employed him for." And that's ultimately the greatest testament to that scene, in which Garfield provided for one of the most impressively explosive displays of acting perhaps ever caught on film by an actor of only his age.
That's also where his entire performance succeeds the most — in its humanity. A performance that can only be thought of as a gift to audiences, like the one I watched the film with who stayed through the credits just to catch his name. The one they called "that kid" before the start of the movie now had a name, and it was his performance that unanimously dominated the conversation as the moviegoers emptied out. Plenty of actors can make lemons into lemonade, and the lemonade in this character was very well already offered by Sorkin's screenplay and Fincher's efficient directing. But Garfield managed to make Mount Olympus out of it. It's the pièce-du-résistance so far of an already glowing and well decorated career from this actor, and it's a staggering achievement. It may very well be the performance of the year.
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