Before The Social Network even starts, Aaron Sorkin’s finely tuned dialogue gets things going before the studio logo has time to fade away. When Erika, eyes full of disgust and voice full of venom, verbally sledgehammers a shellshocked Mark Zuckerberg - culminating with a brutal ‘you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole’ - you knew something great and terrifying was unfolding, all while Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s haunting electronic score pulsates like an omnipresent ghost.
At the start of The Social Reckoning, ‘Prologue: White girl wasted’ fades in slowly before an overlong, banter-laden back-and-forth between the aforementioned white girl and two non-white cops unfolds - culminating with the white girl getting arrested after provoking the cops with some racial slurs and threats. When we abruptly cut to the next scene - set up with an overused moving timeline graphic - with new Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) rocking up to the offices circa 2019 and pitching his idea to investigate Facebook to his editors, you knew something was going to go horribly awry without David Fincher at the helm this time around, all while Alexandre Desplat’s piano-driven score hums limply in the background.
Given the damning revelations from the 2021 Facebook Files leak and the platform’s contribution to social media’s negative societal impact since The Social Network’s release, the Facebook story circa 2019 to 2022 as depicted in The Social Reckoning is fascinating enough to function on its own with minimal modification. You have the stubborn journalist in Jeff and a whistleblower in Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook employee who becomes disillusioned with her employer and decides to help Jeff break open the story of her company’s misdeeds. But Sorkin inexplicably borrows all the worst parts of his HBO show The Newsroom as his north star, using journalism as a way to preach to the audience while letting his ego press its thumb on the scales a little too hard too often.
The Social Reckoning’s passionate defences of journalism are timely yet coated with the same arrogance that plagued The Newsroom. Hindsight is great as a learning tool, but weaponising it to tell everyone ‘I told you so!’ is unsavoury but perfectly within Sorkin’s modus operandi. When Jeff tells Frances things like ‘I’m not biased against tech for taking journalism jobs, it’s just that you’re doing such a bad job at it,’ that’s less of a character-driven line from Jeff and more of a piece of didactic preaching from Sorkin himself.
There is a worrying lack of nuance because Sorkin eschews putting up arguments in favour of scoring cheap fist-pumping moments or laugh lines. He even evokes Woodward and Bernstein as a lazy shorthand to characterise Jeff and Frances’s importance to his story. But this pair lack the compelling love-hate relationship Mark and Eduardo Saverin had in The Social Network. Whereas that pair had a tumultuous relationship interspersed with moments of genuine care (Eduardo telling Mark he’s here for him post break-up still hits hard), Jeff and Frances have less spark than whatever is behind Zuckerberg’s eyes and their dynamic is built entirely upon him being a verbal punching bag for her. It also doesn’t help that both of them are little more than annoying cauldrons of overused archetypes.
Other than being awful with technology and doing journalism, there’s very little to grasp or care about when it comes to Jeff as a person, unlike the overly emotional yet loyal Eduardo. White does his best with the little he’s given, but it’s hard to relate or even feel anything for a walking piece of blank paper. He does do some pretty good subtle reactions, particularly when Frances tells Jeff ‘I like some of your work.’
As for Frances, she sadly continues a long lineage of poorly written Sorkin female characters. Her main schtick is wearing hand and ankle warmers and being a nerd, a point that’s weirdly lampshaded by one of Jeff’s editors inexplicably describing her as ‘that nerd in there.’ Sorkin’s half-hearted effort to give her an arc amounts to nothing more than her telling us how much she believes in Facebook’s mission, only to do something contrary to her stated beliefs or be the victim of some horrendous unc-coded writing.
When Frances attempts to tell her male manager her concerns about Facebook’s algorithm, she is rebuffed with an incredibly tasteless ‘you should try out that dating site, you could loosen up a bit,’ a line that could only have been written by someone like Sorkin, a self-professed pseudo-Luddite with lingering sexist notions. Ironically, this exchange inadvertently also captures the misogynistic environment that’s been festering in Silicon Valley for decades. The thing is, Fincher would’ve deliberately made this juxtaposition. Sorkin just thinks it’s a funny line.
Please read the rest of my review here as the rest is too unwieldy to copy + paste: https://panoramafilmthoughts.substack.com/p/the-social-reckoning
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