The Social Reckoning

The Social Network ended with Mark Zuckerberg, the wealthy and powerful creator of Facebook, staring at his computer, alone, hoping that an ex he treated shabbily might friend him back. Zuckerberg apparently gets the last laugh, as portrayed in The Social Reckoning, because even though he and Facebook become the subject of a hard-hitting Wall Street Journal series of articles about the company’s blatant and dangerous ethics violations, Facebook hasn’t gone anywhere, and its practices have stayed the same if not gotten worse (no thank you, Meta AI) in the ensuing years.

Aaron Sorkin wrote the first movie, and wrote and directed the latest one, and he’s somewhat saddled with a story that resembles All the President’s Men — if Nixon had stayed in office despite the best efforts of Woodward and Bernstein, that is. The greatest flaw of The Social Reckoning is that David Fincher isn’t directing, but its greatest strength is Sorkin’s script, which the writer directs with greater competence and energy than earlier behind-the-camera efforts like Being the Ricardos, Molly’s Game, and The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Leaving behind the moral ambiguity of The Social Network, Sorkin focuses on two genuine heroes this time: Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and WSJ reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). Frances sees an acquaintance (Portia Doubleday, Mr. Robot) transform from open-minded progressive to MAGA racist, and as she later tells Horwitz during their first clandestine meeting in 2019, “I wondered who radicalized her. It turns out, we did.” (For a movie chock-full of real people and their real names, it’s a little awkward how this scene forces Frances and Jeff to jump through linguistic hoops to avoid saying “Bernie Sanders.”)

The film’s timeline shifts back and forth between the initial steps of tech-phobic Jeff working with Frances to uncover more of Facebook’s inner workings, discovering how unchecked rage-bait is amplified to keep users engaged, and 2021, as Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong takes over for Jesse Eisenberg) is being coached to testify before Congress about the need for less restrictions on social media. The appearance of Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr), a former consigliere of Zuckerberg’s, allows the two men to engage in some deliciously heightened Sorkin exchanges about the limits of free speech and the responsibilities of Facebook and other online platforms.

If this sounds more like a made-for-TV procedural than the rich tapestry of character, ambition, betrayal, paranoia, and hubris that made up The Social Network, it absolutely is. But The Social Reckoning is, at least, a fully engaging and even entertaining yarn about very unpleasant recent history, brimming as it is with uglier and uglier facts, and Sorkin knows how to spin it.

The snappy, platonic banter between Frances and Jeff buoys all of this bad news and allows room for more-than-capable supporting players (Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Patrick Fischler, and Billy Magussen, to name a few) to step into their crossfire and make themselves heard.

Madison has made the perfect choice to show audiences her range beyond her Oscar-winning work in Anora by playing a character whose polar-opposite personality still informs a fighter’s determination. Dealing with neuropathy and self-conscious about her cold wrists and ankles — and her body in general — Frances is sharply intellectual and brutally self-effacing, with none of Ani’s bravado. (The actress makes both characters quite funny, but from sharply different angles.)

As for White, he proves the dictum that acting is listening; Jeff spends most of the film on the receiving end of Frances’ information dumps, but he’s very much present and reactive in every scene, calmly nudging his reluctant source into more dangerous waters to get the damning information the story requires. He also gets one of Sorkin’s most effective comebacks: Assessing the crumbling state of journalism and the unchecked misinformation that takes stage in its place, he tells Frances, “It’s not that I’m not mad at tech for taking jobs away from journalists, but that you do it so badly.”

After his brilliant turn as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice, Jeremy Strong is perfectly cast as the equally despicable and even more powerful Zuckerberg, but he’s very much a secondary role. The actor makes each moment count — there’s a particularly chilly scene where the mogul informs Frances and her team that a 1% loss of user engagement isn’t worth decreasing fake news by 68% — but he’s absent for too long to make the impact he might have otherwise.

Alexandre Desplat’s insistently obvious score will make you miss Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ work in the previous outing, and even returning cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth trades poetry for prose this time around. But on its own terms, the film captures the COVID/January 6 moments, and the role Facebook played in making both of those phenomena worse than they had to be, with accuracy and dramatic impact. As a social-media platform, Facebook’s position in popular culture might have become something of a punchline to anyone younger than the generations who remain extremely online and still held in its thrall, but The Social Reckoning is a reminder that, for the powerful people responsible, the joke’s on the rest of us.

Director: Aaron Sorkin
Screenwriter: Aaron Sorkin
Cast: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr, Jeremy Strong
Executive producers: Lauren Lohman, Roger McNamee, Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, Broderick Johnson, Andrew A. Kosove
Producers: Todd Black, Peter Rice, Stuart Besser, Aaron Sorkin
Director of photography: Jeff Cronenweth
Production design: Jon Hutman
Editing: Alan Baumgarten
Music: Alexandre Desplat
Sound design: Julian Slater, re-recording mixer/supervising sound editor
Production companies: Columbia Pictures, Alcon Entertainment
In English
112 minutes