PLOT: Facebook data engineer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), concerned over how users are becoming increasingly radicalized, leaks thousands of the company’s internal documents to Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White).
REVIEW: The best way to enjoy Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning is to pretend it’s not a sequel to The Social Network and just approach it as another movie about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. It doesn’t share any of the same actors, and the style of filmmaking couldn’t be more different, outside of a similar visual palette due to returning DP Jeff Cronenweth. This is a far more conventional film, opting for an uplifting, crowd-pleasing vibe that puts it more in line with Sorkin’s own The Trial of the Chicago 7 than David Fincher’s movie.
While certainly overwritten, with no one in the movie actually talking like real people (a common thing with Sorkin when he’s directing his own scripts), The Social Reckoning is nonetheless quite engrossing and certainly a topical film. Like it or not, Facebook has changed the world and has had a profound effect on our daily lives. This takes a deep dive into the responsibilities of such a platform and how its pursuit of bigger profits may have caused irreparable harm to the mental health of its billions of users.
Yet, it’s not a hit-piece attack on Mark Zuckerberg either. As played by Jeremy Strong, the film ultimately attempts to be somewhat evenhanded in the way it explores his philosophy that Facebook is simply a corkboard and that whatever people put on it really isn’t his responsibility. There are some who may agree with that sentiment, but the movie attempts to illustrate how users can inadvertently become radicalized due to the content they are being fed 24/7 by potentially dangerous groups, something any long-term user of the platform can confirm for themselves just by logging in for an extended period of time.
In The Social Reckoning, Zuckerberg is more of a peripheral figure. Strong wisely doesn’t ape Jesse Eisenberg’s iconic performance, instead attempting to capture the more confident Zuckerberg we see nowadays. It’s nuanced and convincing, and the scenes with him working with a group of damage-control experts to prepare his testimony are among the most compelling parts of the film.
Bill Burr is excellent as Charlie, a former employee who is brought on to challenge Zuckerberg, with him giving voice to the contrary argument to Zuck’s corkboard analogy by saying the platform is like a crossing guard who’s not doing their job. Burr, with his energetic delivery, makes Sorkin’s dialogue feel almost naturalistic, making him an actor Sorkin would be wise to use in his future projects. He’s like Alec Baldwin or Joe Mantegna when they act in a David Mamet movie — it just sounds natural coming from him.
But Strong and Burr aren’t the stars of The Social Reckoning (although perhaps they should have been). Rather, the movie focuses on whistleblower Frances Haugen and Jeff Horwitz, as played by Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White. No one can fault their performances, but it’s through this aspect of the story that Sorkin indulges in a typical “feel-good” story, complete with people punching the air in triumph and an uplifting score by Alexandre Desplat that couldn’t be more different from Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s iconic score from the original. At one point, Haugen and Horwitz name-check Frank Capra, and that seems to be the vibe Sorkin is going for.
Madison has been careful choosing projects following her Oscar win for Anora, and she’s good as Haugen, even if the Sorkin dialogue coming from her often feels terribly overwritten. Jeremy Allen White fares somewhat better, but only because his character is written as more passive, with him having fewer big Sorkin speeches.
It’s in these stretches of the movie that you see Sorkin’s weakness in directing his own material, in that another director like Fincher or even Danny Boyle (who did a great job with Steve Jobs) might have had him pull back a bit. When you’re making a hard-hitting, ripped-from-the-headlines movie, his prose can’t help but feel fake and flowery. Again, no one actually speaks like the characters do in this movie, with them giving us the impression that Horwitz and Haugen had this wisecracking, flirtatious repartee throughout the entire investigation that never totally convinces.
Even still, I must admit that I got invested in The Social Reckoning. Even if his movies are overwritten, Sorkin does have a fundamental understanding of the fractured world we live in today, and there are moments in the film that illustrate how normal people are being radicalized online by a constant negative feedback loop that are chilling.
It’s not a masterpiece like The Social Network, but it’s still a more than decent movie on its own merits, and the actual scenes set within Facebook (or Meta, as it’s now called) are masterful.
The post The Social Reckoning Review: Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook Drama Is No Social Network, But It’s Still Compelling appeared first on JoBlo.
