‘The Social Reckoning’ Wants to Be ‘All the Zuckerberg’s Men’

Social media is bad. The addictive nature of being on those apps falls somewhere between cigarettes and crack cocaine. The billionaires that run the companies behind these platforms do not have the public’s best interests at heart. 21st-century corporate culture is a combination of a cult and a crime syndicate. Profit trumps civic responsibility. The bottom line is more important than the truth, regardless of whether you can handle the truth or not.

Maybe you’ve heard all of these things before. It’s good to have occasional reminders, however, which is where Aaron Sorkin comes in. The screenwriter/director/showrunner has been here before, having crafted stories involving the failings of institutions, optimists tilting at windmills out of necessity, and Facebook in particular. The Social Network (2010) remains a stone-cold masterpiece, an origin story about how an idea born from an Ivy League misfit turned into a gamechanger. It was a David vs. Goliath story, with the main character — real-life nerd-king Mark Zuckerberg — playing both parts. David Fincher’s rigorous direction and Jesse Eisenberg’s performance deserved their flowers. Sorkin’s script deserved its Oscar.

A lot’s happened since then, and the idea of Sorkin returning to that piñata with bat in hand would ideally be cause for salivating. Especially since the politically outspoken cineaste, now doing double duty as both writer and director, has a hell of a subject teed up for hits: “The Facebook Files,” a series of 2021 Wall Street Journal articles that exposed negligence and malfeasance on the company’s part in regards to peddling misinformation, ignoring potential safety concerns, and giving hate groups a stage on which to recruit and rage.

On one side, you had investigative journalist Jeffrey Horwitz (Jeffrey Allen White) and true believer-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), meeting in secret, chasing down leads, smuggling out classified intel. On the other, Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) as self-appointed tech-bro emperor, imperiously declaring he could do whatever he wanted while crouching behind the shield of free-speech advocacy. The result was a blow against the bad guys. You can’t make this shit up, because you don’t need to.

The Social Reckoning isn’t a sequel to Sorkin’s earlier work so much as a revisiting of old Silicon Valley battlegrounds and taking stock of the new casualties. It’s a drama about the importance of journalism and people being willing to speak out, now more than ever, as well as a showcase for Method-acting immersion and a 21st century screwball comedy dripping with that particular dialect known as Sorkinese. The man loves a rat-a-tat-tat rapport that echoes back to the days of cinematic dames, dopes, and swells, and as with his TV shows (Sports Night, The West Wing, The Newsroom), he’s locked and loaded this latest film with dialogue designed for volleying at high-speed velocity. Whether that fits with the rest of the story he’s trying to tell is irrelevant, because Sorkin’s gonna Sorkin. Therein lies both the feature and the bug.

Because the very thing that distinguishes his work — that gives it an old-school zip and the pleasurable sensation of witnessing righteous people doing righteous things, one verbose speech at a time — has a way of reducing heroes and villains to mouthpieces. There are times when you’re watching a compelling two-hander that dips and swerves into 1970s conspiracy-thriller territory, with White and Madison surfing the narrative’s forward momentum and playing off each other nicely. The duo pair surprisingly well, especially when The Bear star’s casual delivery offsets Madison’s ability to go from 0 to 60mph, and vice versa. You can see what the movie wants to be in those moments, a sort of All the Zuckerberg’s Men, and you feel yourself leaning in as they uncover one rancid statistic after another about Facebook’s less-than-rigid approach to civic integrity, its emphasis on Meaningful Social Interactions (MSI) that prioritizes “outrage-bait,” and its dismantling of guardrails. Hurwitz is technically a tech reporter, but he identifies covering Facebook as a “political beat.” He — and the movie — see the bigger picture from the outset.

And then there are moments when you feel like Sorkin is simply setting down a soapbox and making his characters deliver diatribes, conversational detours, trivia-night tidbits, snappy answers to stupid questions, and his own personal bloviating while standing on it. You can feel yourself recoiling. Actors love Sorkin scripts because the man loves language, as well as the spark that happens when patter allows performers go toe to toe. Yet the sudden swerves from shoe-leather cinema to “Say, Joe, whaddaya know?” back-and-forths and outright speechifying are jarring, to say the least. There are time-outs for rants and banter about Frank Capra movies and Golden Age MGM musicals. One retort in regards to mansplaining should have been left on the cutting room’s floor. These do not humanize the men and women doggedly pursuing truth and justice onscreen. They simply turn them into Sorkin-lite avatars. White and Madison do some graceful heavy lifting here. They also deserve better.

Meanwhile, who’s that over there, twiddling his mustache while tying damsels to railroad tracks? It’s Jeremy Strong, giving us a Zuckerberg that’s one part megalomaniacal villain and one part tech-billionaire automaton. The actor plays the Facebook founder like an alien — The Mark Who Fell to Earth — and while the intensity and mimicry is impressive (that voice!), you see the effort more than you see the engagement. Strong is no slouch when it comes to portraying IRL men of power driven by they less-than-better angels — his Roy Cohn in The Apprentice is a stunner — but he too becomes collateral damage in the tsunami of populist straw-man arguments that make up the bulk of Sorkin’s telling-snark-to-power. Not even some excellent foils, one cool and collected (Sinners‘ Wunmi Mosaku) and the other hot and sputtering (Bill Burr, a standout), give you the sense that the movie views its antagonist as anything more than an opportunity to shriek “Zuck you!”

“Everyone deserves a voice,” Horwitz says. “Not everyone deserves a microphone.” Sorkin’s voice has been his recipe for success and his weapon of choice, raised in defense of the little man, compassion, and common sense. Those elements are all present in The Social Reckoning. So is an abundance of sentimentality, a handful of supporting characters that are little more than wisecrack bots, and a final shot that’s so cringeworthy it will haunt you for weeks. Don’t get us started about the Jan. 6 recreations. It’s a compilation of the best and the worst of Sorkin, bellowed into a microphone that’s giving off a tad too much feedback.