Review: The Social Reckoning

There is something perversely appropriate about The Social Reckoning arriving sixteen years after The Social Network. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 film caught Facebook while the consequences of its creation were still unknowable, transforming a bunch of depositions and coding sessions into a chilly tragedy about ambition, resentment and the very human desire to be accepted. We know considerably more now. Facebook grew up. So did its problems. And if The Social Network wondered what kind of person might create such a thing, The Social Reckoning is considerably less ambiguous about what that creation eventually wrought.

The problem is that Sorkin, now serving as both writer and director, has made a movie that knows exactly what happened but rarely figures out how to make us feel like we are watching it happen to actual people.

Inspired by the Wall Street Journal’s “Facebook Files,” the film centers on Facebook employee Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), who becomes increasingly troubled by internal research suggesting the company understands the damage its algorithms can cause and has little interest in seriously addressing it. She eventually connects with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), beginning the cautious relationship that will lead to Haugen leaking thousands of internal documents and Horwitz turning them into a series of reports. Meanwhile, Jeremy Strong takes over the role of Mark Zuckerberg, allowing Sorkin to periodically return to the man at the center of the empire.

As a piece of narrative organization, The Social Reckoning is often impressive. Sorkin remains exceptionally good at taking an enormous pile of information—algorithms, internal research, corporate policies, journalistic procedures—and arranging it so an audience can follow along without requiring a prerequisite course in Facebook bureaucracy. The gradual development of trust between Haugen and Horwitz also gives the movie a sturdy procedural backbone. There are stretches where it becomes easy to imagine abandoning the movie afterward to spend several hours reading the original reporting. That might also be the problem.

White is perfectly serviceable as Horwitz, while Madison feels oddly constrained as Haugen. Neither performance is bad, and blaming either actor seems misplaced. The rhythms around them simply feel wrong. Sorkin’s dialogue has always depended upon velocity, interruption and actors capable of making paragraphs sound like spontaneous thought. Here, exchanges that should crackle instead frequently land with a conspicuous thud. The pauses are a fraction too long, the cutting a fraction too sluggish. You can practically hear where the Sorkin rhythm is supposed to be without ever feeling it.

More damaging is how little interior life Haugen and Horwitz develop beyond their functions within the story. Sorkin clearly regards them as heroic figures, but admiration isn't characterization. The movie tells us what they risk and what they accomplish without discovering enough about who they are when they aren't advancing the plot.

That becomes particularly frustrating whenever Haugen ventures outside Facebook and the movie decides she needs another illustration of its thesis. A teenager being bullied online, a family dealing with social media’s consequences—encounters begin to feel less like life intruding upon Haugen’s worldview than Sorkin arranging visual exhibits for the prosecution. The argument hardly needs the help. We understand what the movie is saying.

Strong fares somewhat better simply because Zuckerberg provides an inherently stranger figure to play, although the performance sometimes sits uncomfortably close to an extremely accomplished impersonation. Strong finds amusing details in Zuckerberg’s clipped rhythms and alien remove, but Sorkin is less interested in reopening the mystery of the character than passing judgment on what he became. Compare that with Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg, whom The Social Network allowed to remain fascinatingly unknowable even as we watched him destroy nearly every meaningful relationship in his life.

That comparison may be unfair, but The Social Reckoning repeatedly invites it. Alexandre Desplat’s score occasionally reaches toward the electronic unease Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross brought to Fincher’s film before settling into something much more conventionally Hollywood. Emotional swells arrive to underline moments that would be stronger without them, another example of a movie curiously unwilling to trust the audience to know how it feels.

That tendency reaches its apex when Sorkin crosscuts the finale with a recreation of January 6. Whatever power exists in the connection is diminished by the insistence with which the movie draws the line for us. The conclusion isn't difficult to reach. Sorkin nevertheless circles it, highlights it and eventually places an exclamation point beside it.

Perhaps that explains why The Social Reckoning ultimately feels more useful than compelling. Sorkin has made an accessible account of a complicated and important story, and viewers unfamiliar with Haugen, Horwitz or the Facebook Files may leave wanting to know much more about all three. But The Social Network took facts and discovered tragedy inside them. This takes tragedy and too often reduces it back into facts.

The information is damning. The reporting is fascinating. The movie explaining both is strangely dull.

2/5