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.