The Social Reckoning Needed David Fincher
Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning is a sequel to The Social Network that insists it isn’t one and a political film that insists it has no politics. Audiences have noticed, and they’re staying home.
Someone will eventually make a great movie about social-media-induced insanity. The Social Reckoning isn’t it. (Columbia Pictures / Alcon Entertainment)
Reporting on how badly Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook drama The Social Reckoning is flopping, I won’t bother to do any better than USA Today’s mild zinger, “Moviegoers are unfriending The Social Reckoning.”
Meanwhile, the critically panned horror film Other Mommy is crushing it at the box office. But that’s unsurprising, because The Social Reckoning doesn’t have Jessica Chastain’s grinning, spider-crawling monster-mommy to draw people in during a Halloween season when the horror film pickings this year are rather slim. Of course, as The Social Reckoning’s featured creature, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is pretty monstrous too, but even with Jeremy Strong playing him, he can’t convey the skin-crawling repulsiveness of this deeply weird billionaire tech mogul who strikes the public as so sociopathic, blank-eyed, and uneasy in his own skin that he seems likely to be a member of an alien species colonizing planet Earth.
For Sorkin, it’s a very disappointing second bite at the Zuckerberg apple. The Social Network, which Sorkin wrote, had a major impact when it was released in 2010, because David Fincher made use of his remarkable gift for creating a miasma of dread in portraying the steady, willful, self-driven dehumanization of young Mark Zuckerberg. As astutely played by Jesse Eisenberg, Zuckerberg’s inner creep emerges and rapidly takes him over. It’s made aggressive by the competition from legions of other young male creeps around him at Harvard and later in the tech industry. The film gave us a nauseating look at how the most arrogant human scum rose to the top in the unwholesome nerdboy Olympics that gave rise to Silicon Valley and the global tech takeover of all our lives.
It’s too bad Fincher wasn’t along for the ride this time. Here, Aaron Sorkin opted to direct his own script, which he’s insisting should not be considered a sequel to the ultra-successful Social Network. That’s a pretty futile stance toward a film that’s inevitably bound to be marketed and regarded as a sequel, especially because Sorkin himself keeps evoking the earlier film. As in The Social Network, for example, The Social Reckoning deploys a complex flashback structure framed by a team of professionals (played by Wunmi Mosaku and Bill Burr among others) serving as Mark Zuckerberg’s legal counsel and trying to coach him into appearing human before he testifies to congress. This involves such tasks as getting Zuckerberg to nod his head, smile, and show a modicum of empathy for anyone in the world, as a regular person might do. It’s a tall order, and Jeremy Strong goes all-out in portraying a man so pathologically icy and stiff that he’s the stuff of either nightmares or farcical comedy.
The Sequel That Isn’t a Sequel — or Something
Despite Sorkin’s claims that he’s not just made a sequel, he apparently had been fully confident that Jesse Eisenberg, the star of The Social Network, would be returning, noting rather bitterly that “The studio offered him every incentive you can offer an actor to do it.” Eisenberg turned the big-money role down flat, saying he no longer wanted to be identified with Mark Zuckerberg and “was tired or even aggravated by it,” according to Sorkin. Smart. Rising respect for Jesse Eisenberg.
Obviously, Aaron Sorkin should never direct an Aaron Sorkin script, because that creates an exponentially greater seismic impact of Sorkin-ness on our quailing human consciousness. The Social Reckoning is a heavy plod of a movie that keeps attempting to weave in lighter qualities, with patented Sorkin rapid-fire dialogue and plenty of comic relief festooning a ponderously serious subject. As in all Sorkin works, like A Few Good Men, The West Wing, and Steve Jobs, the gradual bonding of fractious characters who are temperamentally opposed to each other plays out with maximum corny sentimentality. He undeniably has a good sense as to what works. And yet here, it simply doesn’t.
In the end, the film winds up being an overly familiar narrative about real-life whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), who risks the wrath of Zuckerberg by joining forces with Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) to expose what’s dubbed “The Facebook Files,” a series of articles on the deleterious effects of Facebook, Instagram, and other Zuckerberg-dominated internet platforms on an increasingly addicted public. It’s strange how belated a movie this seems, telling us all what we already know as the furious pace of terrible real-life events outruns The Social Reckoning by miles.
As Frances, Mikey Madison plays a part completely opposed to her star-making, Oscar-winning portrayal of the vivid, confident, loudmouthed stripper in Sean Baker’s Anora (2024), which is probably one big reason she agreed to do it. As portrayed here, Frances is an introverted and dedicated data scientist who’s bought into the rhetoric about the democratizing ideal of Facebook and is made increasingly uneasy by what she’s finding in practice as a member of the Civic Integrity Team meant to guard the public’s interest. She keeps claiming to love her job at Facebook, but it’s impossible to see what she loves about it, besides the money and being able to eat in fancy restaurants. She works in a friendless hive of grim worker bees where paranoia reigns and no one will even glance at her findings on the dangerous effects of prolonged Facebook use on the public.
Mikey Madison — an inherently vibrant performer and compulsively watchable — brings charming humanity and excellent timing to the role, keeping the movie tolerable if not adequate. She lightens up Jeremy Allen White, who’s been sinking into a morass of mockable self-seriousness since his star-making performance in the highly lauded FX series The Bear. He’s not playing one of his brooding depressives here, thank God.
Together, Frances and Jeff arrive at the most alarming algorithmic tendency on Facebook, which is driving users toward ever more extreme content, stoking a tendency toward paranoia, self-righteousness, outspoken racism and xenophobia, and knee-jerk outrage that’s already led to the arrest of a former acquaintance of Frances’s. In the film’s opening sequence, we see this acquaintance, an overreactive blonde named Kayleigh (Portia Doubleday), filming her own traffic-stop encounter with the cops, which devolves into her fit of hysteria and ultimate arrest, shrieking racist insults and right-wing talking points as she’s cuffed and carted away. What made a monster of this young woman, whom Frances remembers as a sane and reasonable defender of progressive causes?
Well, it’s the same monster-making Facebook practice that the film will present as the main motivating factor behind the violent January 6 attack on the US Capitol by lunatic Donald Trump supporters, many of them members of far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, trying to take back the presidency for their addled hero. And that climactic scene is shot here for massive slo-mo impact. Curiously, Sorkin avoids depicting some of the more absurd cosplaying figures, like Jacob Chansley, the “QAnon Shaman” in bison-horn headdress, and Trump entirely. Sorkin apparently wanted to ensure that it stayed a melodramatized American tragedy, uninflected by any element of the darkly ridiculous, that finally shocks even the uber-arrogant Mark Zuckerberg into repentant silence. And yet, of course, it’s ridiculous.
A Political Film Hampered by Milquetoast Politics
The Social Reckoning’s politics are quite clear — Sorkin’s usual “progressive” liberal centrism versus the threat of right-wing conservative madness — which makes it a matter of teeth-grinding fury to read that Sorkin denies he has any such intention:
I don’t have a political agenda. . . . I am not trying to persuade you of anything. I am trying to captivate you for however long I’ve asked for your attention in a dark theatre.
Obviously, [The Social Reckoning] is dealing with something serious, but we’re not asking you to eat your vegetables. It’s not Homework: The Movie.
We’ve heard this all before. Alejandro González Iñárritu just made the rounds denying any specific political agenda in his new film Digger, which is even more ludicrous in that case. Either the same cowardice seizes directors just as soon as it comes time to promote their films, or they’re getting coached by producers, studio executives, and PR flacks. Or, most likely, both.
But Sorkin isn’t fooling anyone. The problem isn’t that the movie is political; it’s that its politics are not up to the task — not even close. Someone eventually will make a great movie about social-media-induced insanity. Unfortunately, The Social Reckoning is far from it, failing even to approach the power of its Fincher-directed (and Sorkin-penned!) predecessor.
Maybe, just maybe, the guy who gave us The West Wing just isn’t the man for our times?