In the months leading up to the release of The Social Reckoning—a sequel to David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network, which covered the rise of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook—movie people, at least, spent a fair amount of time grumbling about the fact that the film’s writer-director, Aaron Sorkin, is no David Fincher. That, of course, is demonstrably true. Sorkin wrote the script for The Social Network and won an Oscar for it. Fincher was for a time in talks to direct The Social Reckoning, but ultimately that gig landed with Sorkin, and the grousing began. Sorkin specializes in crackling dialogue and heartfelt, if often self-righteous, liberal views, but the movies he has directed (The Trial of the Chicago 7, Being the Ricardos) haven’t been considered particularly dynamic. His excessive earnestness can be both a plus and a minus: While it’s great that he cares, too much caring can be exhausting.
Which is why it’s something of a surprise that The Social Reckoning moves along as briskly as it does. This is an account of how Wall Street Journal writer Jeff Horwitz (played here by Jeremy Allen White) cracked the story of how, ahead of the 2020 election, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg essentially encouraged the amplification of extremist views, a factor that fed directly into the violent January 6 attack on the Capitol. Horwitz can’t write that story alone; he enlists the clandestine help of a loyal Facebook engineer—part of the organization’s civic integrity team—who has become skeptical of certain company policies. Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison)at first offers only minimal information; she loves her job and doesn’t want to lose it. But the deeper she digs into Facebook’s sinister practices of promoting rage bait to increase engagement, the more disenchanted she becomes.
The Social Reckoning is at its core an old-school shoe-leather journalism thriller. Sorkin’s point seems to be that even in the digital age, there aren’t really any new ways to be a thorough, ethical journalist—all the old rules still apply. His script is dense with information, and the story—which opens in 2019 with Horwitz’s joining the paper’s San Francisco bureau and more or less wraps up with the publication of his Pulitzer-winning multi-part 2021 expose the Facebook Files—leapfrogs from one year to another and back again. (The time shifts are helpfully indicated by a sliding timeline appearing at the bottom of the screen.) Sorkin’s approach to telling this story is somewhat professorial—there’s a lot of telling without much showing. But cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth—the frequent Fincher collaborator who also shot The Social Network—gives the picture a handsomely polished look. Somehow, the runtime slips by faster than you might have expected.
Maybe that’s thanks, in part, to Sorkin’s casting choices. Zuckerberg is played by shapeshifter du jour Jeremy Strong, who radiates a kind of robotic clamminess. In many of his scenes, he’s ensconced in a mock Congressional hearing, overseen by a “crisis specialist” (played by a take-no-prisoners Wunmi Mosaku) who has been hired to make him more likable, a Sisyphean task if ever there were one. He sits, straight-backed and tense, in a dark suit, working terrifically hard at the task of appearing human. At one point in the film, when he’s grilled about his company’s role in promoting the views of hate groups, he snaps, “We’re a corkboard. We don’t control what people pin to it.” Strong is attracted to playing unlikable people, and he’s good at it, though often—as with his portrayal of fixer extraordinaire Roy Cohn in The Apprentice—he offers a dash of tempered sympathy to remind us that these people are actually human. Not so with Zuckerberg: he focuses almost solely on the tech oligarch’s calculating, evasive nature. It’s the right choice.
As Horwitz, White serves up a classic, muted portrayal of a guy so dedicated to his job that he’s seriously fun-deprived. Oddly enough, it takes a smart, ultra-serious tech engineer to loosen him up, and his scenes with Madison, in which their characters banter and spar, are the movie’s best. At one point he refers to Frances as a Cassandra, citing the story of the cursed Trojan princess who has the gift of predicting the future, though no one believes her. Only he’s mangled and misapplied the myth; Frances sets him straight, and fills him in on the correct metaphorical meaning of Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried Wolf as well. It’s Madison who anchors the movie. Frances wears studious-schoolgirl glasses, and she suffers from neuropathy: In chilly San Francisco, she needs to bundle up in chunky leg warmers and wristlets to keep numbness at bay—this garb gives her a waifish air. At one point she describes herself as “the girl in class with her hand raised that nobody wants the teacher to call on.” That’s a mouthful of classic Sorkinese if ever there were one, but as she spins the words out, Madison is so plaintive that she makes you see that girl. Frances Haugen is the conscience and the true hero of The Social Reckoning, and Sorkin knows it. He practically hands the movie over to Madison, and even in a movie filled with talking—and often with guys talking—it’s her stalwart yet unassuming presence that makes it sing.
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