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WHALEFALL

Producers: Brian Grazer, Brian Duffield, Jeb Brody and Allan Mandelbaum   Director: Brian Duffield   Screenplay: Brian Duffield and Daniel Kraus   Cast: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy, Emily Rudd, Sam Franich, Grayson Paul Solomine and Sam Skolnik   Distributor: 20th Century Pictures

Grade: D+

Whatever virtues the 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus on which it’s based might possess (and it was pretty well received at the time), this screen adaptation by the author and director Brian Duffield is one of the silliest survival tales ever told on screen.  And what makes “Whalefall” even worse is its super-serious approach to the emotional closure sought by a son after the death of his estranged father. 

The movie begins, in fact, with the suicide of Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin), a grizzled old California seaman, who, after a coughing fit that’s the obligatory movie indicator of terminal illness (thankfully, at least blood doesn’t come up), straps on a weight belt and jumps off his boat as his pal Hewey (John Ortiz), weeps softly with a fishing rod still in his hand.  (Mitt’s illness prevents him from diving again, you see, and that’s his whole being.) 

Some time later his son Jay (Austin Abrams) returns home to Monterey from his college studies in Iowa, still smarting over his dad’s mistreatment over the years—all misguidedly intended to toughen the boy up for a life on the waves, as we see in repeated flashbacks not only to Jay’s teen years but to what he’d endured as a boy (played at various points by Grayson Paul Solomine and Sam Franich).  His somber, taciturn mien doesn’t go unnoticed by his mother Zara (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd), but they celebrate the good times they had with Mitt (playing “Go Fish,” for example), either unaware of the psychological damage Jay suffered at his hands or dismissive of it.

Though Jay declines to visit Mitt’s grave, he’s upset when one of his sisters remarks how sad it was to bury an empty coffin, and decides to dive alone into the canyon off Monastery Beach where his father died despite warnings that the area has been closed for safety reasons.  He collects the needed gear from Hewey’s shop, where a young man (Sam Skolnik) lauds Mitt, whose picture hangs on the wall, for having saved his life, sneaks past the police to the shore and enters the water to find his father’s remains and thus prove himself a dutiful son.

For a few minutes he ambles along the ocean floor, but when he reaches the edge of the cliff at the edge of the underwater canyon he’s startled when a monstrous squid rushes up from the depths trying to escape a hungry sperm whale.  Jay gets caught in one of the squid’s tentacles and is dragged into the whale’s mouth along with the beast.  He grabs onto the whale’s teeth trying to extricate himself, but hasn’t the strength to use them as a ladder to freedom, and is sucked inside the sub-shaped creature with only an hour or so of oxygen in his scuba tank.

The rest of the picture is devoted to his desperate attempt to escape this unlikely situation, which Jonah and Pinocchio suffered before but without quite the same degree of discomfort.  Jay must contend with the squishy interior of the whale, with the result that he’s often squeezed by what appear to be throbbing fingers of rubbery flesh. It’s difficult to repress giggles as Jay, gasping for breath, tries different strategies to escape, using the luminous glow of a jellyfish that’s happens to have been scooped up by the whale to light his way.

Presumably the book was more precise in describing the various paths he tries, but the murkiness of the imagery (Aaron Morton was the cinematographer, with Guillaume Rocheron and Mark Hawker handling the visual and special effects, respectively) leaves one pretty much guessing about the internal whale topography being traversed; even one sequence in which the boy climbs up a long tunnel to reach the glimpses of sky is unclear (is this the animal’s blowhole?).  Indeed, the only elements of the effects work that impress at all are the external shot of the squid and the whale, especially when the latter is attacked by a pack of orcas; and those are very few.   

The upshot is that for all Jay’s grunting and flailing about, exactly what he’s trying to achieve at any point is never entirely clear, and as paced by Duffield and edited by Pietro Scalia, his plight grows increasingly tedious, as well as unpleasant.  If you’ve ever seen the photos taken during a colonoscopy, just imagine being stuck in a gigantic version of them brought to a kind of special-effects life for an hour, and you’ll get the idea.  (It makes you yearn for the cheesy imagination of “Fantastic Voyage.”) Joseph Trapanese’s score and James Miller’s sound design try to take up the slack, but they can’t engineer pleasurable excitement by themselves.

But that’s not all Jay and the viewer have to endure.  There are also those repeated flashbacks to Mitt’s abusive behavior, which grew so bad that it drove Jay to bolt from home and go to Iowa, a decision Mitt derided. Yet now his father’s words come back to the boy, in some mysterious fashion (has his spirit become one with the whale?), and provide the key to his escape.  The answer involves an explosion caused by methane produced in the whale’s digestive tract, which deserves mention because “Whalefall” becomes the second film this summer to use the gas as a crucial plot element.  The other is “Digger.”  Given how disastrously that turned out in both cases, filmmakers might be advised to avoid mentioning methane ever again.

In the end we’re meant to believe that coming through this horrifying ordeal has led to some sort of closure for Jay; he’s apparently come to terms with the incessant bellowing and bullying Mitt meted out over the years because it’s aided in his survival.  This is as psychologically dubious as the whole escaping-the-whale narrative is preposterous.  And, of course, Jay doesn’t achieve his initial purpose of finding his father’s remains.

This is essentially a two-humans piece, and it doesn’t show either Abrams or Brolin at his best.  The former, who was engaging as the dippy delivery driver at the center of “Resident Evil,” is merely dull as emotionally constipated straight-arrow Jay.  The role is a change of pace for him, but not in a good way.  As for Brolin, he’s merely doing a heightened version of the gruff fellow he played a couple of months back in “The Dog Stars,” and comes across as an obnoxious jerk.  It’s hard to find Mitt’s rants anything other than hysterical posturing, however prescient they’re portrayed as being in his son’s eventual survival. 

The title of “Whalefall” carries an environmental message, referring to the fact that when a whale dies and sinks to the ocean floor, its carcass nourishes the rise of a whole new ecological system.  Presumably the allusion is meant to suggest that Mitt’s corpse is also serving as the source of something new and vibrant, though what such a comparison might mean is at best obscure.

In any event, it can be confidently asserted that the movie sinks to the bottom, but all it generates is a lot of unintended laughs.

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THE SOCIAL RECKONING

Producers: Todd Black, Peter Rice, Stuart Besser and Aaron Sorkin   Director: Aaron Sorkin   Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin   Cast: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr, Anna Lambe, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Aidan Laprete, Kelley Pereira, Patrick Fischler, Joey Brooks and Portia Doubleday   Distributor: Sony/Columbia Pictures

Grade: C+

Aaron Sorkin’s companion piece to David Fincher’s “The Social Network” (2010) has something in common with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s recent “Digger.”  They’re both behind the curve.  We didn’t need a movie to warn us about the dangers posed by climate change and continued reliance on fossil fuels in 2026; anybody who’s not an idiot knows that by now.  Nor do we need a picture about the dangers posed by social media; their disruptive, malignant effect is obvious to all.  Nor do we require a portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg as the robotic, soulless megalomaniac we know him to be.   Yet Sorkin, like Iñárritu, apparently believes his film will serve as an explosive wake-up call, when the alarm went off long ago. 

Still, if we’re to be served a dish of late-in-the-day sermonizing, better Sorkin’s adept if workmanlike “The Social Reckoning” than Iñárritu’s grossly overproduced would-be satire.  It’s peppered with Sorkin’s customary snappy, often overlapping dialogue, and though the wordplay might not be as striking as it was in his earlier screenplays, the film still exhibits his skill in choosing actors able to deliver it in style.

Unfortunately, “Reckoning” also shows Sorkin’s habit of heavy-handed moralizing, and his rudimentary directorial technique hammers the points home without much subtlety.

In structural terms the movie resembles “Network” less than it does Tom McCarthy’s superb 2015 “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe’s investigation into child abuse by the city’s Catholic clergy.  Here the focus is on the work of the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco office, and especially journalist Jeff Horowitz (Jeremy Allen White), into secretive practices at Facebook designed not only to increase profit but to encourage rage and vitriol among users. 

Horowitz’s efforts bore fruit because of internal company materials provided by Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a data engineer at the company who became a reluctant whistleblower when her loyalty was undermined by those practices, especially after she saw how an old acquaintance (Portia Doubleday) had been radicalized by immersion in the platform.  Sorkin helps out viewers who might not be expert in the details of Facebook’s operations by positing Horowitz as technologically obtuse, reliant on Haugen to explain them in ways the audience can also absorb.    

Sorkin juxtaposes the process of their investigation with episodes showing stone-faced Facebook impresario Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) being prepped for testimony before a U.S. Senate committee by an exasperated crisis management expert (Wunmi Mosaku) while an old advisor (Bill Burr) repeatedly urges Zuckerberg to be more forthcoming about the company’s questionable decisions about manipulation of algorithms and more open to fact-checking posts rather than presenting himself merely as a “free-speech absolutist.”  These sessions are frequently interrupted by a company media honcho (Billy Magnuson) bursting in with further news of the Journal’s reportage; indeed, it’s comical when Mosaku’s Raya responds to each interruption with an infuriated “What’s going on back there?”

It should be noted that Charlie Garrigan, the character played by Burr, is fictional, at best a composite of Zuckerberg’s critics within the company, but actually the voice through which Sorkin can present his own impassioned critique of the mogul’s ultra-permissive position when it comes to broadcasting lies and misinformation to gullible users.  Their fictional diatribes, amplified by the script’s repeated emphasis on Zuckerberg’s fury over Garrigan’s disloyalty in penning a critique of Facebook practices in an op-ed for the New York Times, become a centerpiece of the debate Sorkin wants to dramatize over the company’s indifference to the harm it, and the other social media outlets it’s gobbling up, are doing to both individuals and the society as a whole. 

And the importance of the debate is magnified by the fact that the narrative is occurring in the period 2019-2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic is spreading across the country and the world, and when the disputed presidential election of 2020 leads to the January 6 riot at the Capitol, an event that forces Zuckerberg to reconsider his position on fact-checking (though only momentarily, as a closing caption reveals in a condemnatory twist).

But Sorkin can’t end without a hint of triumph for his real hero, Haugen, whose congressional testimony later in 2021 is dramatized.  But even then, it’s connected with January 6, when she and Horowitz meet prior to her appearance in the very room that was used during the insurrection as a triage center for treatment of police injured during the insurrection—flashbacks to which are inserted into the scene.  Afterwards Haugen delivers a bit of her opening statement and pumps her fist defiantly after it’s over.

“The Social Reckoning” is bolstered by the performances of Madison and White, who develop a comfortably credible rapport, and of Strong, whose ramrod-straight, steely-eyed Zuckerberg is one of the most frightening monsters on the screen this year.  Most everyone else is fine if unexceptional; among Facebook lackeys Anna Lambe has a couple of good moments as Frances’ repentant colleague and Magnuson oozes slime (he also delivers one of Sorkin’s creepiest lines when he describes Facebook as living in a “post-government world”); Burr, however, tends to overdo in pushing Sorkin’s POV, and other company gofers (Patrick Fischler, Joey Brooks, even Mosaku) are pretty nondescript.    

Horowitz’s WSJ colleagues are also decently but unspectacularly played.  Kris, the hard-nosed bureau chief, is nicely embodied by Betty Gilpin, as are her more amiable lieutenants (Gbenga Akinnagbe and Nelson Franklin).  But the standouts, in terms of audience reaction, will probably be Horowitz’s hard-driven interns (Aidan Laprete and Kelley Pereira), whose exhaustion in the face of his demands will draw chuckles.

The picture is effectively mounted.  Jeff Cronenweth’s widescreen cinematography has a touch of elegance, as does Jon Hutman’s production design; and if the dialogue sequences sometimes plod a bit, that’s due more to Sorkin’s choice of pacing than defects in editor Alan Baumgarten’s technique.  (“Spotlight” had far greater urgency, and so, in fact, did Sorkin’s own similarly talk-driven “Trial of the Chicago 7.”) 

Baumgarten, moreover, keeps the shifting timeline clear (the use of a back-and-forth scroll at the bottom of the screen was a good idea), and he and Cronenweth show real dexterity in the January 6 riot scenes, whether they’re archival footage, newly shot sequences (as the triage room material must be) or a combination of the two.  Susan Lyall’s costumes are apropos, while Alexandre Desplat contributes a rather self-effacing but nimble score.

But one has to wonder whether the message Sorkin wants to deliver will have much effect.  After all, previous efforts to bring the stories of whistleblowers to the screen, like Bill Condon’s “The Fifth Estate” (2013) about Julian Assange, or Oliver Stone’s “Snowden”—have attracted only modest audiences and have pretty much disappeared.  “Spotlight,” on the other hand, was a moderate success, and other stories about corporate whistleblowing have sometimes done fairly well.  The connection to “The Social Network,” a major hit, can’t hurt, especially if people believe this is a sequel, which it really isn’t.

It’s still an important message, though, even if it’s one that’s been around a while.  Maybe it’s a matter of better late than never.  “The Social Reckoning” tells a truth that’s hardly shocking anymore, but though it’s rather pretentious in its finger-pointing, it serves at least as a useful, if far from cinematically extraordinary, reminder of the pernicious impact that social media is still having on us all, despite efforts over the last five years to ameliorate the harm.