White, Madison worth watching in Sorkin’s engaging second Facebook story
If you feel like you’re spending too much time on social media these days, go see The Social Reckoning. You’ll leave the theater wanting to delete your accounts immediately. Writer/director Aaron Sorkin, a filmmaker not exactly known for subtlety, gives us another absorbing power-to-the-people rebuke of people and institutions that have made us worse, not better, as a society.
Fifteen years after Sorkin won a screenwriting Oscar for The Social Network, his dramatic retelling of Facebook’s origins story, he returns here with a follow up that he both writes and directs. Based on a 2021 series of Wall Street Journal articles by reporter Jeff Horwitz dubbed The Facebook Files, The Social Reckoning focuses on Facebook engineer-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen and her collaboration with Horwitz. Haugen and Horwitz’s work led to a congressional investigation and numerous lawsuits regarding Facebook’s profits-over-safety practices, including developing algorithms that pushed dangerous, false, and addictive content.
Sorkin’s themes here are two-fold. Not only does he present the questionable ethics of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his company, but he also laments the decline of investigative journalism. If Sorkin’s rabble-rousing intent is to make you angry at the state of media today, he more than succeeds, even in spite of a few heavy-handed, Hollywood-esque moments. The film’s closing scene, for example, feels forced and tacked on for maximum dramatic impact.
But, as fans of Sorkin’s oeuvre well know, his often polemical pictures achieve box office victory and critical acclaim because despite their sometimes cheesy storytelling flaws, they are also hugely entertaining and always immensely watchable. As in The Social Network, The Trial of the Chicago 7, A Few Good Men, and The West Wing, Sorkin’s rapid-fire dialogue in The Social Reckoning delivered by an A-list cast keeps us alert and invested.
The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White plays Horwitz as a determined and thoughtful journalist whose curiosity and concern are as legitimate as his desire to break a big story. White reunites here with his Deliver Me from Nowhere costar Jeremy Strong, who plays an older, but perhaps not wiser, version of Mark Zuckerberg. Strong looks nothing like Zuckerberg (or Jesse Eisenberg, who played him in The Social Network), but he uncannily captures Zuckerberg’s robotic, cold delivery and social awkwardness. Mikey Madison, 2024’s best actress winner for Anora, is terrific as Haugen, a highly intelligent engineer who starts out deeply believing in Facebook’s stated mission of social connection. But her loyalty turns to disillusionment when she begins to understand that Zuckerberg and his senior staff (including an appropriately vile Billy Magnussen, a master of smarm) want constant growth at the expense of safety and mental health.
In a smaller but no less pivotal part, comedian Bill Burr plays Charlie, a Facebook consultant inspired by the real-life early investor and advisor Roger McNamee, who became so unenamored with Mark and Facebook that he wrote a tell-all book about the company. The scenes between Mark and Charlie, as they discuss how to handle some of the damning accusations being leveled at the firm, are some of the most riveting and well-acted in the film. Sinners Oscar nominee Wunmi Mosaku as a public relations strategist prepping Mark for his congressional hearing testimony and Betty Gilpin (Sarah from Widow’s Bay), as the WSJ San Francisco bureau chief also bring appropriately layered performances to supporting roles.
But White and Madison carry the film, and their dynamic is both believable and endlessly engrossing. Whether or not you think Facebook has been appropriately punished for its transgressions is another matter, but Sorkin’s thought-provoking story definitely deserves a “like.”
– – – – –
The Social Reckoning is currently playing, including at the AMC Metreon, AMC Kabuki, Apple Van Ness, Presidio Theater, and Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco; the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville; the Rialto Cinemas Cerrito in El Cerrito; the Regal Jack London in Oakland; and the Cinemark Century theaters in Richmond, Walnut Creek, and Pleasant Hill.
