Aaron Sorkin began his directing career at the tender age of 56, decidedly later than most. As one of Hollywood’s most widely celebrated screenwriters, he might’ve felt the compulsion to bask in a little more glory, and what better way to garner attention than calling the shots on set? The leap from screenwriter to director certainly isn’t unheard of — some of American cinema’s greatest filmmakers, like Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, successfully transitioned from pen to bullhorn. It’s company Sorkin would like you to think he keeps, peppering his latest film with rapid-fire wit and genuine concern for the well-being of the nation.
But The Social Reckoning releases into a broken nation, and it is itself a broken film. The film is a sequel to The Social Network in name only (kind of like Doug Yule recording Squeeze under the Velvet Underground moniker): where David Fincher cooled The Social Network’s Sorkinisms and executed a style befitting the technological revolution it depicted, The Social Reckoning yearns for a world before that revolution. It evokes dramas such as JFK or the later work of Clint Eastwood, depicting an America where its people may have their disagreements on a micro level, but on the macro can agree with the steadfast pillars of democracy and Constitutional integrity. It refuses to acknowledge that the revolution is over, and the war for a people-oriented digital economy has been lost. There’s a great movie to be made about picking up the pieces in the wake of that defeat (and it’s called Possible Love), but The Social Reckoning’s relationship to social media seems mediated by that very technology, offering holier-than-thou commentary on the kinds of outbursts Sorkin likely saw doomscrolling between sessions in the tanning bed.
The film opens on a prologue titled WHITE GIRL WASTED, in which a white woman gets into a heated argument with two police officers of color who pull over to the side of a freeway to examine why her car has stopped. The woman, Kayleigh (note the ostentatious spelling), is clearly intoxicated, and she records the interaction to great fanfare for the right-wing Facebook group that’s taken her in. Dismayed by her friend’s behavior, Facebook engineer Frances Haugen believes her employer may have had something to do with it. She tries reforming the company she holds so dear from within, but, rejected at every opportunity for face time with Facebook’s top brass, she reluctantly turns to Luddite investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz. Meanwhile, in the future, Mark Zuckerberg prepares for a Senate hearing with a team of experts.
The Social Reckoning delivers some of Sorkin’s least efficient writing to date: the film adopts a multi-part structure, but it also betrays that structure by implementing a multi-timeline approach within each part to connect Haugen’s whistleblowing to the attempted insurrection of January 6. Sorkin is trying to walk in the footsteps of All the President’s Men (Woodward and Bernstein are name-dropped), yet All the President’s Men is extremely clear-eyed, never once straying from its mission of exposing the Watergate scandal. The Social Reckoning elects for the needlessly busy at every turn, toggling between 2019 and 2021 when it anticipates the audience getting bored, or putting a human face to the problems on its mind with pitifully contrived scenarios, like when Frances finds herself on a date with a finance bro who believes chlorophyll water will make his sweat smell good because someone on Facebook said so, or when Frances runs into a family at dinner who are at their wits’ end because of cyberbullying.
Sorkin’s film is both wickedly pedantic and totally cowardly: you will not hear the name Donald Trump, nor, for that matter, any politician’s name. When Frances explains to Jeff how Kayleigh was radicalized, she mentions that Kayleigh was into progressive causes, particularly one progressive candidate, and she only turned red after this candidate lost the nomination for the presidency. Frances is obviously referring to Bernie Sanders, but is Bernie’s name so dangerous we must leave it off our lips? Sorkin doesn’t have the courage to look directly at the political moment he wants to litigate. Instead, he leans back on trite abstractions about the role of real journalism in an anti-expertise world. “You and me got in the game at the last two minutes of journalism,” Jeff’s editor says to him at a meeting shortly thereafter. “Say your goodbyes.” “No,” Jeff responds. It’s a mic drop in an empty auditorium.
Elsewhere, Jeremy Strong cosplays as Mark Zuckerberg, defending Facebook as a platform for free speech (Strong gets Zuckerberg’s inflection, but because of his own look can’t physically capture Zuckerberg’s permanent childlike stasis), and Sorkin forms his arguments about the inefficacy of Facebook as a mediator between politicians and people by throwing out a barrage of mixed metaphors: the difference between vegetables and a lump of dirt shaped like a carrot, a referee, a public square, and jet fuel on a fire. Their essential shallowness is obfuscated by their quippy delivery, couched in between $10 words and served up like a three-star Michelin meal. Take a bite, though, and it tastes an awful lot like fast food.
As director, Sorkin largely disappears behind the competence of sole Social Network survivor Jeff Cronenweth, whose photography is as sleek as an Apple product’s form factor. For the film’s first hour, one may even erroneously believe he’s grown into his directing pants. Over time, however, his incompetence in the role rears its ugly head. Sorkin will cut to a frenetic handheld frame — in black-and-white, naturally, because the scene is set in the past — at a boardroom meeting, only to cut to that meeting again with a perfectly static frame. His control of tone, meanwhile, is practically nonexistent — someone storms in to interrupt Zuckerberg’s brain trust to announce there’s a riot in the Capitol with the same campy shriek as Professor Quirrell’s proclamation that there’s a troll in the dungeon in Harry Potter, and a last-second, Breakfast Club-ish button reads as a pandering invitation for the audience to feel good about the shitty world we find ourselves living in.
The great irony of The Social Reckoning is that it’s going to kill when clipped and fed to the very algorithms which precipitated its existence. It’s built not to play on the big screen, but in bite-sized chunks to those already primed to agree with its stance. Like 14th, it lays bare the poverty of the neoliberal imagination when confronted with a problem it can’t solve. At the very end of the film, Jeff and Frances talk to each other before a hearing. Frances, an introvert, is afraid of coming across as cold. “You don’t look like a freak,” Jeff says to console her. “You’re just really mean.” The line bears a faint resemblance to The Social Network’s scathing closing remark. This writer will echo the sentiment in kind: “You’re not a truthteller, Aaron, you’re just an asshole.”
DIRECTOR: Aaron Sorkin; CAST: Mike Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong, Wunmi Masaku, Betty Gilpin; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures; IN THEATERS: October 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 52 min.
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