Movie Review: The Social Reckoning

© Sony Pictures

The Social Reckoning is a blistering and somehow toothless real life tale from Aaron Sorkin.
by Jeremy Fogelman

Cast: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, with Bill Burr, and Jeremy Strong

Rating: ★★

What’s to be done with Aaron Sorkin? He’s behind many acclaimed shows, some “so bad they’re good” like my beloved, terrible The Newsroom, and he's written some of the great films like A Few Good Men, Moneyball, and David Fincher’s The Social Network, which characterized Mark Zuckerberg as an ultimately decent dude with a lot of issues and naivete. Of course that was in 2010 when Facebook ruled as king of social media, and was in general considered mostly beneficial -- but it was also around when websites were encouraged to post their links on Facebook and would get more engagement (this ultimately had most sites losing engagement instead).

But Aaron Sorkin also has directed a few movies too -- the perfectly fine Molly’s Game, the well meaning but a little unbalanced The Trial of the Chicago 7, and the very shaky Being the Ricardos. Now we get the follow-up to The Social Network called The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Sorkin, focusing on a timeline between 2019 to 2021 when Facebook was directly connected to hearings and whistleblowers.

© Sony Pictures

Our ostensible lead of sorts is Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), mild-mannered investigative journalist for the Wall Street Journal who is interested in Facebook’s potential issues, with the real ‘heart’ of the movie being Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a brilliant data scientist who believes in the vision of the company but is concerned about radicalization. While Jeff tries to find things out and Frances frets about what to do, we also jump back and forth in time to watch Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) being led by a media team to be more friendly in an upcoming congressional hearing.

This time jump business feels directly connected to The Social Network composition, but unlike that one where it’s “here’s how we got there”, in this movie the timeline isn’t really thematically connected in the same way. Although for most of the movie Jeremy Strong portrays Zuckerberg as a cold-hearted capitalist who barely seems to care about his supposed "freedom of speech", the movie bizarrely includes an entire segment about the January 6th riot at the Capitol, and really seems to let everyone off the hook, while not being brave (or accurate) enough to ever mention the president by name.

It’s an odd thing, because much of the back and forth between Zuckerberg and his old colleague, Charlie (Bill Burr), is well written and handled, and the rapport between Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White is warm and engaging, if oddly romantic in a way that doesn’t pay off one way or another. Mikey Madison really is the star of the movie -- she’s playing the most empathetic person, and the most emotionally revealing character, and does a great job consistently, even when being asked to show up in a dress soaking wet for no story reason.

© Sony Pictures

Jeremy Strong also does a great job, portraying an isolated, off-putting CEO with unending anger below the surface -- is it authentic or accurate? That I can’t say, we all only know the Mark we’ve seen shown to us, so I can only speak to the performance itself which is excellent. The rest of the Facebook acting team is strong too, like hyper-competent Wunmi Mosaku as crisis manager Raya, or unctuous Billy Magnussen as PR exec Teddy Marks. We even get some decent little bits from Betty Gilpin, the San Francisco bureau chief who’s a bit of an unemotional character, or Portia Doubleday in a thankless, nameless role as the friend of Frances who has been radicalized.

Sadly the payoff for her character, and essentially all payoffs, run cold -- especially the very ending of the movie, which feels like it should have been ominous or horrifying but instead feels jarring and almost a bit flip. This is the problem with a director/writer in general -- there’s little place to hide, and although the topic itself is an important one, the movie doesn’t really ultimately do much to show how people are impacted other than the Capitol riot. Not wrong, of course, but not personal, so I’m not sure how well people will be able to get any of it.

So to sum it all up, the acting was great, and some scenes worked well, but the overall structure doesn’t hold together and the ending falls flat. Not what I wanted to see out of this one sadly, but that’s what I saw.

The Social Network has a run time of 1 hour 52 minutes, and is rated R for language.