1 hour ago
11
Aaron Sorkin’s fact-based ode to the foot soldiers of democracy working in newsrooms and behind screens, “The Social Reckoning” doesn’t so much galvanize emotion around the events that led to January 6 as it does nullify them and compress them into the grim, thin line stapled across your face as you watch the film. His fourth directing effort is also the latest self-making case that the Emmy-winning “The West Wing” writer should not be behind the camera on his own material — with too much reverence for his own cornball text that’s less old-fashioned than completely out of date, seemingly incapable of killing any so-called darlings from script to screen.
A sequel to “The Social Network,” for which Sorkin won a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, this draggy, so-what journo drama stars Mikey Madison, fresh off her own “Anora” Oscar, as former Facebook data engineer turned whistleblower Frances Haugen. She’s the one who revealed how algorithmic manipulations at Facebook (now Meta) had disastrous effects on society — the ones where a few likes and posts would push wine moms through a portal to the dark web. This digital journey potentially shaped the ideologies that formed into a riot on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021.
It’s not Madison’s fault that her filmmaker and screenwriter cannot lead her to a performance as affecting as the zesty lap dancer she played in Sean Baker’s film. The ensemble and production around her, from Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz to Jeremy Strong Method-acting the practice out of business as a robotic, Caesar-cut Mark Zuckerberg, is a chemistry void that offers little of substance to chew on. Meanwhile, as Frances starts to yield to Jeff’s entreaties to share classified materials and help take the social media platform down (which obviously didn’t happen), you can feel the grind of Sorkin desperately wanting to turn their dynamic into a screwball romance, with even a direct reference to Frank Capra in Madison and White’s stiffened badinage.
Separately, not doing Sorkin’s follow-up to one of the greatest films of the 21st century any favors is that its purportedly barbed, fiery assessment of big tech’s metastasizing plague on human consciousness falls just over two months before Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI satire “Artificial” opens. “The Social Reckoning” also screened for press on the same day that Guadagnino’s dynamically entertaining, invigoratingly creative, and altogether disturbing new film premiered at the New York Film Festival. It’s a double bill that won’t inspire confidence in Sorkin’s certainty of his own vision, regardless of your feelings about “Artificial,” and while I’m not in the business of comparing films (even though I just did), it’s likely to happen more times and in stronger terms.
Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in ‘The Social Reckoning.’Leah Gallo/Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett CollectionWith a level of Celiac disease that forces her to keep her extremities sheathed in gloves and custom sleevewear, Frances works as a data manager and content moderator at Facebook with the plucky resolve to make the online platform — and ergo the world — a less toxic place. Isn’t it pretty to think so? Sifting through offensive posts, she finds cell phone footage of a young, blond woman who is “white girl wasted” (per Sorkin’s chapter card, and you know the thing about chapter cards in a bad movie is that you start counting down how many are left) and taking video of the cops who’ve intercepted her on the side of the road. She accuses the officers, one Black and the other Latina, of reverse racism and gestures toward more epithets before she’s escorted into the back of the patrol car. Holy shit, Frances thinks, as the lightbulb goes off that this woman has potentially been radicalized by the very platform she’s just shared the video on. Turns out this is a woman Frances once knew.
Cut to, well, a couple of timelines going on. In early 2021, Mark Zuckerberg (Strong) is rehearsing for the Congressional hearing on misinformation that Facebook had been alleging curating for its users — misinformation that created a path for alleged human traffickers and drug cartel members and eventually bots to launder messaging, along with suicidal teenage girls with body image issues. This mock panel session feels as if we are watching Strong rehearse for his own performance in the rest of the movie — what facial gestures and mannerisms to apply when, and why, how to comport himself on a witness stand.
That rest of the movie featuring Strong, who it’s been said was in character through every step of production, shows Zuckerberg in an imperiously black-and-white 2018 unveiling the “Meaningful Social Interactions” (MSIs) ranking system that would essentially go on to kill journalism. These were the algorithm “updates” that favored said wine moms as prevailing peddlers of information over the reputable news outlets that once benefitted from the social sharing platform but have since withered and died on it. The discovery of those MSIs and their reveal came packaged to the public via Frances and Jeff Horwitz across 17 bombshell reports, i.e. the Facebook Files, in the Wall Street Journal. But Sorkin reduces much of their interactions, whether in the WSJ newsroom or in Puerto Rico where Frances retreated to warmer weather in early-lockdown days, to a stalled meet-cute that feels torn out of the cheekiest of “West Wing” subplots or from “The Newsroom.” And yet the actors have an almost startling lack of connection because every line they’re tasked with reading plays as if from a mouthpiece trying to force someone else’s words out, awkwardly and clunkily. Because that’s what this is.
The rest of the ensemble (from a sparky Betty Gilpin as Horwitz’s editor and Bill Burr as a fictionalized composite of a Zuckerberg ally) gets blotted out by Sorkin’s own agitprop for the Sorkin brand. He also gives his bizarrely rose-colored take on what Haugen and Horwitz achieved, which was no doubt essential journalism, a worrying girlboss aura. The movie ends with Haugen doing a literal fist bump into the air, riding off into the horizon of glorious victory. “The Social Reckoning” argues that the aftermath of their whistleblowing is still somehow felt today. In actuality, living as we do in 2026, it pretty much feels like… no one cared, and nothing changed? This wasn’t “All the President’s Men.” Trump has resumed power, many of the January 6 rioters were pardoned, and misinformation is in the water. “The Social Reckoning” is another of those films about “how we got here.” I want to know how the hell we get out.
Grade: D+
“The Social Reckoning” opens in theaters from Sony Pictures on Friday, October 9.
English (US) ·