Substance vs. Style in ‘The Social Reckoning’
Columbia Pictures
The availability and reliability of print journalism is eroding at a rapid pace. Social media is a force of atomization and depression negatively affecting everyone from preteens to the elderly. Our collective identity is imperiled by conspiracy theories and political fanaticisms that often take violent paths. That these things are occurring is hardly newsworthy—they have sedimented as a strata of public life in the US across the last decade. As Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning reflects, “why is the bigger story.”
“Why?” is the question that The Social Reckoning seeks to answer. In 2010’s The Social Network (which Sorkin wrote), the why centered around the question mark that was, well, Mark. Jesse Eisenberg portrayed Zuckerberg as a lonely, insipid student fueled by an angry inferiority complex. Or as Rooney Mara’s Erica puts it succinctly, “an asshole.” But in The Social Reckoning the why shifts attention to us: Why has this social media platform so radically changed our entire way of inhabiting our world?
Zuckerberg (here played by Jeremy Strong) is of course present in Sorkin’s follow up, but he’s really only a subplot. The focus is now on Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a young software engineer working in Facebook’s Civic Integrity team, and Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Initially Horwitz is really just looking to uncover evidence that Facebook is censoring and filtering comments—betraying their public claims of free speech advocacy—but that hardly registers as a concern for Haugen. She’s troubled by the role her company seems to be playing in the radicalization of its users. The reach and power of far right extremist groups is amplifying on the network, and Facebook doesn’t care about stopping it.
The film ping pongs between 2019 and 2021. Horwitz attempts to build a rapport with Haugen in the earlier timeline, hoping to convince her to gather evidence and go on the record. She’s reluctant—she loves her job, and she believes in what Facebook provides. But she wants responsibility to guide the company, so she gives Horwitz enough to piece a story together. The more recent timeline shows Zuckerberg practicing in training for congressional hearings about Section 230. He’s guided (with questionable success) by Wunmi Mosaku’s Raya and Bill Burr’s Charlie, who try their best to give this corporate sociopath at least a semblance of emotional intelligence.
The Social Reckoning is full, uncut Aaron Sorkin (David Fincher’s directorial restraint is not here this time to balance him out). The dialogue is persistent, snappy, and unsubtle, with conversations often built around distinct, indignant monologues. If you ever happen to lose track of the technical details, don’t worry—just align your moral compass with the character that shows the most affection for classic musicals. These habits imbue actual recent history with an air of unreality. But that doesn’t make the film unenjoyable or slight.
The greatest issue for Sorkin’s film is its proximity to Fincher’s The Social Network, and this connection will lead many to respond to this film in frustration. However, The Social Reckoning doesn’t want to be that earlier film; it hardly wants to be in conversation with it, narratively or stylistically. The film it wants to be is actually The Insider—another story of a dogged reporter uncovering a story with a sole expert who might just blow the whistle.
White and Madison are young performers who have recently skyrocketed (White for his central role in The Bear and Madison for her Oscar winning performance in Anora). Neither is showing anything new here, but they’re each enjoyable to watch. White is a good fit for Sorkin’s punchlines: the writing always leans toward an exclamation point, tempting a big performance, but White opts for still pauses and simple deliveries. Madison is more energetic and sarcastic, though she’s a bit limited by the script. Strong, meanwhile, has earned a lot of attention prior to the film’s release for his work in this role. He’s effective, but every line from Zuckerberg is so stilted and dead-end that it’s hard to be sucked in by what Strong’s bringing.
I wish that Sorkin demonstrated as much care in piecing together The Social Reckoning as he did in choosing its subject. The film lays out how Zuckerberg and Facebook’s executives made decisions that amplified violent, extremist content and misinformation, playing a direct role in the rise of fanaticism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, and political violence. The world is a worse place for these decisions, decisions made for the sake of a stock price. We know it all at this point, but there’s a power in seeing this greed and deceit play out in a film.
Style betrays substance, at times, however. A grandiose score here, a limp line of dialogue there, an overly heavy handed shot. As the film nears its climax, it fails to let reality stand for itself. This is nowhere as obvious than in the very structure of the climax. Having bounced between timelines to create narrative throughlines, Sorkin intercuts Haugen’s congressional testimony with extended recreations of the attempted insurrection on January 6, 2021. This sequence is void of any narrative causality, but Sorkin relies on the violence of the Capitol attack to charge his film with an emotional valence he feared it would lack on its own.
There’s enough here—here, in the recent history that we’ve all lived through—to generate our ire toward the calculated evil of social media CEOs, or to spark our vociferous support for whistleblowers and supporters. We don’t need the clumsy cues that reveal a marked distrust of the audience. In the day following, I spent more time thinking about these minor (though numerous) annoyances than I did the societal ramifications of Horwitz’s reporting.
Unforced errors don’t obliterate the insistence of The Social Reckoning, but they do weaken its urgency. Still, Sorkin’s film offers an outspoken cry against technological-capitalist forces that would seek to “eliminate human friction” and thereby remove humanity’s capacity for morality and creativity.
