“The Social Network” is my favorite movie of all time. The 2010 film written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher achieves, in my opinion, the perfect balance of story, performance and ambience, all backdropped by a Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross soundtrack that is so haunting and so beautiful that I often listen to it while writing.
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The general consensus among critics is that David Fincher, known for darker films, both aesthetically and thematically, provided the appropriate yin to Aaron Sorkin’s yang — overwritten dialogue that lacks subtlety and is, often, for lack of a better descriptor, corny. He tends to write characters who aren’t really talking with each other so much as they are monologuing at each other. And there’s some of that in the Social Network, but the monologues are directed, edited and mixed so well that they become riveting instead of cloying.
The same cannot be said for “The Social Reckoning,” Sorkin’s 16-year-later-sequel that he both wrote and directed. And it shows. Sorkin failed to utilize the skills of its talented cast which includes Academy Award Winner Mikey Madison, Emmy Award winners Jeremy Allen White and Betty Gilpin, and Golden Globe, Emmy, and Tony award winner Jeremy Strong, all of whom are doing their best with the material they’ve been given. The material just isn’t very good. Sorkin or his studio also failed to secure Reznor and Ross to do the music so the score feels stale, and failed to secure Fincher to direct so the movie feels and looks flat.
Maybe I was destined to be disappointed by this movie because I hold its predecessor in such high regard. I wish this had been a movie entirely independent from “The Social Network.” Perhaps it would suffer less from comparison. But as it is, I’m embarrassed by “The Social Reckoning” being mentioned in the same breath as “The Social Network.”
There is a(nother) very interesting movie to be made about Facebook’s impact on humanity and democracies. I remember when whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before Congress in 2021 and revealed that the leaders at Facebook knew their algorithm amplified hate and political extremism, dramatically increased the rate of eating disorders and depression in teen girls, and alleged that Facebook was misleading investors.
Then, last year I read “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, former Director of Public Policy at Facebook. In the book Wynn-Williams details the authoritarian-like culture at Facebook, and how the ambition of Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg and his executive team endangered individual users as well entire societies.
A dramatization of any of those revelations would make for a compelling watch, But instead, Sorkin made the curious decision to tell the story of how Wall Street Journal writer Jeff Horwitz got Haugen to leak documents so he could publish an expose. Using a lot of, you guessed it, monologues.
Look, I get it. I’m a writer. Writers love writing stories about other writers. Which is why every romcom lead in the nineties and aughts worked for a magazine. But it behooves a writer to ask, “What’s more interesting, the breaking of a story or the story being broken.” The answer is almost always the latter. Unless it’s “All The President’s Men,” and this movie is a far cry from that one.
But even “All The President’s Men,” the 1976 film about Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward breaking the Watergate story in the Washington Post, actually showed the Watergate break-in and the characters at the center of the scandal. The viewer understands why the story they are writing will impact the world. “The Social Reckoning” fails to do so.
In fairness, it does make a few attempts to show the consequences of Facebook’s unfettered power — a woman, at the very beginning of the film, berates two officers of color, films the interaction, and posts the video to a political page on Facebook. Later in the movie, Haugen, played by Mikey Madison explains that this woman was her friend and that Facebook radicalized her. But we are not shown how.
We see a family out to dinner at the same restaurant as Haugen, and she overhears the parents and their tween daughter discussing the daughter’s online bullies. We are told, by the father, that the abuse is on Instagram and it’s relentless. But we are not shown how.
Then, we see the woman from the movie’s beginning at the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the movie sloppily implies that Facebook is responsible for not only her radicalization, but the entirety of the day’s events. But, of course, not shown how.
The bulk of the film is spent watching a journalist trying to coerce a source into giving him documents to meet a deadline. They exchange over-written monologues right up until the movie’s conclusion, a point at which many viewers might realize they have learned nothing new from what they have just seen.
It’s a movie, I believe, that would be best to watch on a long haul flight after you’ve watched every available episode of “Abbott Elementary” and half a season of a Housewives franchise. By then you’ll be so starved for entertainment and so deprived of oxygen that you might just find “The Social Reckoning” good. But only then.
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