The Social Reckoning is a sort-of sequel to 2010’s Best Picture-nominated landmark The Social Network, but only the latter film’s screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, and central character, return. Sorkin is also the director now, and that “character” is of course principal Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, less an antihero this time than a straight-up supervillain.
The new film wants to be a gumshoe journalism movie in the tradition of All the President’s Men, but that’s not even the 1976 Best Picture nominee it most resembles. Reckoning feels more like a two-generations later update of Network, the 1976 jeremiad that warned that TV was making us all dumber and more callous, and that putting a suicidal, anger-stroking provocateur on the air amounted to criminal negligence. Network’s fed-up news anchor Howard Beale was playwright and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s fictional creation. Zuckerberg is a real person—and, as he’s demonstrated in the 16 years since The Social Network was released, a real bastard.
Sorkin began his writing career as a playwright, too. Popular opinion has soured on him since the ’90s, a decade he began with a well-loved film version of his play A Few Good Men and wrapped up by creating The West Wing, his reassuring NBC series about how the presidency tests even the best of people. With 2017’s Molly’s Game, he began directing his own scripts. Reckoning is his fourth film as director, and it suffers for this. (The unlikely sequel to an Oscar-venerated film that Social Network director David Fincher has due out this year is The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, a follow-up to 2019’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.)
Paradoxically, the problem is one of stakes. The Social Network successfully embedded its Big Themes within a quarrel over money among impossibly rich young men. In his hunger to join the cultural elite he’d so envied during his time at Harvard University, Zuckerberg was persuaded to betray his only real friend. (Sorkin’s screenplay was an adaptation of Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction book The Accidental Billionaires.)
The Social Reckoning has a far larger canvas: It’s about nothing less than Facebook’s abysmal corporate malfeasance and its global effects. Both the of the film’s two main characters, Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, played by Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison, respectively, have published their own books documenting Facebook’s practice of amplifying ragebait on their site while simultaneously pretending to invest in content moderation and fact-checking.
The fact that the screening I attended was prefaced by a talk between the real Horwitz and the real Haugen only served to reinforce that neither of them, as filtered through Sorkin’s still-entrancing dialogue and White and Madison’s good looks, registers as a character. The real Haugen even pointed out in her remarks that Horwitz was not nearly as hopeless a Luddite when they first met as Sorkin depicted him as in the movie, but that this characterization was necessary to make Horwitz an audience surrogate. The intent of this is to make it seem less didactic when Movie Haugen explains to Movie Horwitz what bits of Facebook jargon like Meaningful Social Interactions mean.
Sorkin’s script is bifurcated between this 2019–2021 journalism story and its early 2021-set PR story, where Jeremy Strong’s robotic Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg having declined to reprise the role) rehearses with a pair of media consultants for his upcoming Senate testimony. Wunmi Mosaku and Bill Burr play the PR pros given the unenviable task of trying to make Zuckerberg appear reasonable and empathetic. They’re both superb, but it’s only in these scenes that The Social Reckoning ever recalls the collisions of ego that made The Social Network so enduring.
The Social Reckoning (112 mins., R) is in area theaters today.
