REVIEW. THE SOCIAL RECKONING: That's What Friends Are For?
Aaron Sorkin created a monster... well, sort of and probably unintentionally.
Back in 2010 when The Social Network became a movie sensation and Sorkin won Best Adapted Screenplay (one of three Oscar wins out of the film's eight nominations), he learned that young males enamoured with the movie's protagonist, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (played in the film by Oscar-nominated Jesse Eisenberg), were pestering the actor for autographs. But not just any ordinary signature. They wanted Eisenberg to sign their memorabilia in this way, "I'm the CEO, bitch," a reference to the phrase Zuckerberg snarkily coined for his own business card.
CEO, indeed. But not necessarily an honorable or heroic one, as Sorkin recently admitted, along with some remorse, that the tragic figure he'd hoped to bring to life, based on Ben Mezrich's 2009 tell-all, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, was written as a cautionary tale of ambition gone awry, not the prototype for future Silicon Valley scions.
Eisenberg's reaction was even more traumatic, as his uncanny physical resemblance to Zuckerberg caused many fans to conflate him and Facebook's founding CEO. While that might be flattering to some, Eisenberg claimed the confusion created more personal stress, an experience so profound that he refused to repise the role in The Social Reckoning, despite a reportedly enthusiastic attempt on Sorkin's part to recruit him.
The unintended consequences of good intentions, perhaps?
Whatever the reason, Sorkin has now released his mea culpa of sorts, a companion piece to The Social Network based on events surrounding the Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen (Oscar winner Mikey Madison), and aptly called The Social Reckoning. More legal thriller than biopic installment, Reckoning focuses on Haugen's disclosure of tens of thousands of Facebook's internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and to the Wall Street Journal in 2021. The newspaper's series, known as "The Facebook Files," exposed Facebook's role intensifying extremism and polarization among its membership. Sorkin's script is based on the WSJ's series and reporter Jeff Horwitz's 2023 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Broken Code: Inside Facebook and the Fight to Expose Its Toxic Secrets.
Sixteen years after the first movie's release, Sorkin's vision of what Zuckerberg has become leaves little room for interpretation: he's still an ambitious, unethical shit, but now he's uber-rich and juggling the intended and unintended consequences of managing his social media juggernaut, Facebook, sometimes with seemingly few concerns about the damage his social networking service has created or caused. What originally began as Zuckerberg's date book revenge against all the co-eds who dumped him during his time at Harvard (re: Facebook was originally called Facemash and designed to rate a woman's "hotness" based on randomly published photographs), became a social and cultural phenomenon (with the help of considerable tweaking by Zuck's business partner Eduardo Luis Saverin and Napster founder Sean Parker), promoted as a way of bettering communication and bringing people together. Yeah, right.
Zuckerberg and his original investors made mega-millions, but by 2020, most of his start-up partners were gone, replaced by thousands of smart, eager tech-nerd employees. But questions about the app's algorithim, specifically, its negative impact on users - everything from political fact checking and radicalization to adolescent bullying and opioid addiction - became hot topics for discussion. It is here that we meet an older, if no less wiser or emotionally ymellow, Zuck, now portrayed to chillingly inhuman effect by Jeremy Strong.
Almost two decades on since Facebook's founding, Zuckerberg finds himself confronted by inconsistencies in the social platform's practice, including - but not limited to - questions about whether its mission "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" is actually happening. That's when Frances Haugen, a data analyist who served as product manager for Facbook's Civic Integrity Team, comes across a video from a former college acquaintance who appeared to have been radicalized by an alt-right extremist group. Her private inquiry about the video leads her to the realization that Facebook's leadership had knowingly approved use of an algorithm that increased violent behavior among its users by 64%.
In a parallel story, Wall Street Journal investigative technology reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) comes to Silicon Valley to see if tech companies are actually doing what they profess in terms of making the world a better place. His random outreach to Facebook employees intrigues a reluctant, but determined, Frances, who responds to his cryptic message when no one at Facebook seems interested in the pattern of behavior she is finding among Facebook users.
The movie juxtaposes Frances and Jeff's subsequent pas de deux as they work together to expose Facebook's lethal practices alongside Zuckerberg's prep to attend a Congressional hearing. The prep scenes are tight and precisely choreographed, accenting both the urgency of the situation and the absurdity of rehearsing an interrogation to appear more sincere. Sorkin's script easily moves back and forth across a very short period of time (2019-2022), using visual markers to keep the viewer apprised of time passing and events revisited as a way of piecing the narrative together.
There's been a lot of comparison among critics about Sorkin's "sequel," claiminig it's not as good as David Fincher's 2010 masterpiece, easily one of the best - if not the best - film(s) from that year. Fincher is an extraordinary director whose films are characteristically dark and unsettling. I would argue, though that, for one thing, The Social Reckoning is not really not a sequel, as almost none of the characters or actors from the original appear in Reckoning. EvenZuckerberg has been recast. Second, The Social Network leaves audiences with a kind of lingering sadness that seemed to define the early 2000s, while Reckoning has a more triumphant, if elusive, sense that perhaps we're on our way in terms of understanding this new tech-inhabited world.
Like its predecessor,The Social Reckoning is filled with wordy, witty dialogue that moves the story along and demands that the audience lean in and listen to every line. Sorkin's scripts are notoriously verbose (think A Few Good Men or Trial of the Chicago 7), and usually filled with clever twists of phrases. But beward the writer than also serves as director. In The Social Network, Sorkin wrote the screenplay and Fincher (himself, as precise a technical director as Zuckerberg is a computer tech nerd) directed. The problem inherent in directing your own script, at least for those writers like Sorkin who may become enamoured with their own scripts, is an attachment to the page that may compromise other aspects of the film. Unlike writer/directors like Woody Allen - who become notable for telling actors to "change whatever they wanted" with his scripts - Sorkin seems much less willing to part with his own prose.
In film critic Matt Neglia's assessment, and in sync with Sorkin's style, the movie "moves at a good pace, plowing through facts and figures at a mile a minute while delivering colorful dialogue that occasionally makes you laugh, though mostly because you know there’s no world in which actual human beings, either online or in real life, would ever talk like this."
Okay. Fair enough. Every day conversations, especially those that are work-related, are rarely as interesting as movie-speak exchanges. But I kind of like snappy cinematic rapport, the literary allusions (from Frank Capra to Charles Dickens and J.R.R. Tolkin), and feeling that really smart people can be engaging, funny, even likeable.
When Frances visits Jeff at his hotel/makeshift apartment and notices a basketball game on TV, she asks why one of the players raised his hand in triumph. When Jeff responds that the player just tied the score before the final buzzer, she questions why anyone would look so happy having just tied the game, but not winning it. "Have you ever been that happy?" she wonders. Later, when she confesses to being "the girl who wouldn't raise her hand in school because none of the other students wanted the teacher to call on her," I could relate... and understand why the basketball fist pump was both an enigma and a desire. These are the kind of movie moments that, for me, elevate the ordinary to something a bit more artistic, making Sorkin's effort commendable in its own right, and not merely a shadow of the original movie.
Sorkin has assembled a tight ensemble case, led by an earnest Madison and eager White. Pay close attention to their faces, especially their eyes, as they exchange ideas and challenge each other's assertions. Their non-romantic chemistry keeps the investigation moving, and they are supported by fine turns from Oscar nominee (for last year's Sinners) Wunmi Mosaku as Raya, a member of Zuckerberg's legal counsel and crisis management specialist, and Bill Burr as Charlie Garrigan, an original investor in Facebook and who became a member of FB's legal team (and loosely based on Roger McNamee). Burr, who is known for his stand-up comedy, serves the role well as a wise-cracking, if disgruntled, former employee who knows Zuckerberg's quirks and idiosyncracies all too well.
But the real performance here is Strong, taking on Zuckerberg's very public persona in what is a supporting role centerpiece. Sorkin weaves Zuckerberg's Congressional prep meetings with the unfolding investigation, then inserts snippets of Zuckerberg's presence at Facebook (as Frances remembers him). These moments not only serve as lynchpins to the narrative arc, they illuminate Zuckerberg's evolution from nerdy, tech-whiz narcissist to successful corporate businessman whose confidence is equalled only by his paranoia. In one intense scene, he tells Charlie, "I know what people say about me. So does my wife. And so will my children." A enormous moment of self-awareness, perhaps, but also one that reveals his reason to control everything else he can.
Taking the baton from Eisenberg, whose earlier portrayal of Zuckerberg suggested a more quirky jittery, ambitious, if not totally altruistic, tech wannabe, Strong changes the molecules by personifying Zuckerberg's evolution from twenty-somthing social misfit to arrogant, self-assured executive. The transformation is seemless: You really believe Strong is the older Zuckerberg, the transition from Eisenberg's earlier work is that fluid.
Strong's ability to represent Zuckerberg's persona as we know him - through photos, videos and countless memes - is remarkable, from mastering Zuckerberg's voice to capturing every intricate moment and gesture. Strong's recent film performances as real-life characters, from his Oscar-nominated Roy Cohn in 2024's The Apprentice to the should-have-been nominated Jon Landau in last year's Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere, are notable for their diversity, but also for Strong's ability to not just mimic well-known figures, but to get under their skin and into their heads. This is a performance that deserves strong Oscar consideration, so I'm hoping to write more about Strong and this role as we get into awards season.
For me, a movie with good-to-great ranging performances, an intelligent script and a fast-moving story are worth going out to the theater to see. Aaron Sorkin's second installment in Mark Zuckerberg's journey may not be as ground-breaking as the first, but it's definitely worth a look. In the tradition of All the President's Men and Spotlight, The Social Reckoning uses investigative journalism to raise important questions, in this case, about the dangers of social media in general and Facebook/Meta, in particular, as they prioritize "profits over people." Mark Zuckrberg & Company may be on the technology bullet train traveling at rapid speed - but who's driving?
What do you think?👍❤️🤣🤗😮😢😡
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The Social Reckoning is currently playing in theaters. It is rated PG-13 for language, drug and alcohol depictions and various other adult social activities.
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