West Wing writer, Aaron Sorkin, has given himself double duty as both screenwriter and director for this spiritual sequel.
The man who wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for the original Social Network aims to tackle one of Facebook’s many controversies in the time since the first film’s release back in 2010.
‘My bias isn’t because tech is taking journalism jobs; it’s because you are doing them so badly.’
Given that any time I seem to see Mark Zuckerberg, he’s wearing a suit and looking sullen from behind a defendant’s desk, I’m sure Sorkin had plenty of scandals to choose from when it came to sitting down to pen a second movie.
One of the industry’s certified smart cookies, it’s no surprise that Sorkin’s opted to adapt the Wall Street Journal investigation into Facebook, which saw the platform exposed from the inside, revealed as a breeding ground for right-wing extremism and a pit of vipers for teenage depression and body image issues.
The Bear star Jeremy Allen White is Jeff Horowitz, the reporter tasked with delving deep into the poison chalice Facebook case. He’s a stand-up bloke, committed to his work and intelligent in his own right, but the higher ups at the Journal are baffled when he bids for the job, as he’s crucially not a tech reporter – he can’t even work a sat nav.
Arguing that Facebook’s shadow has moved far beyond its tech origins and into the political sphere, though, he grabs the opportunity to take the company down with both hands.
White plays Horowitz really earnestly in a way that sings on-screen. I need to see more from him (I’ve watched zero minutes and zero seconds of The Bear so far) because he works well here as the sturdy and steadfast foil to some of the other characters in Sorkin’s quippy and zippy script, which can occasionally leave characters feeling more like ciphers than people in a way that simply wasn’t the case in the original.
He soon teams up with Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, who won an Oscar last year for Anora. Haugen believes that Facebook’s core value is an innately good one – one that brings people together – but when more and more data seems to be pointing to Facebook as a tool to divide and radicalise its users, she feels duty-bound to speak out to anyone who’ll listen.
Sorkin characterises Haugen (who really did blow the whistle on Facebook in 2021) as hyper-logical and somewhat prickly, which (ironically) does lead to her feeling like a concept rather than a real person at times.
Madison rises to the challenge of winning us over, all the same, and she was no doubt a good choice for this script as it stands, but she does stick out like a sore thumb compared to Sorkin’s excellent character work elsewhere, especially in The Social Network, which many will revisit ahead of seeing this.
There’s also a puzzling conceit whereby Haugen is only content to visit Horowitz in person if she dolls herself up as if she were going on a first date. She arrives at his hotel room in an assortment of silky dresses and lacy attire, leaving us wondering if demure and awkward Haugen has these outfits at home or if she buys them in especially, and questioning whether she might draw less attention just rocking up in something casual.
For someone so worried about being seen by her bosses (or just anyone who might recognise her) she really does enjoy standing right up against the window, as well, which would surely be a no-go if she was really committed to the covert operation. You could call these thoughts nitpicks – I’m sure there’s a completely logical reason for these costuming choices that has nothing to do with selling tickets and zhuzhing up the image – but I was left wondering why they didn’t dress up Madison’s male co-star to match.
The film makes its way through 2019 and into 2020, with the shadow of the Pandemic (you know, that lovely thing) emerging as the narrative goes on. Fincher’s film weaved its past and present storylines together with impeccable confidence, sometimes cutting between flashbacks and the boardroom mid sentence. That energy was baked into The Social Network from start to finish, propelled forward by not just Sorkin’s script but that fantastic score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; its techno elements practically winning them their Tron: Ares gig fifteen years early.
Sorkin doesn’t have that same sensibility when it comes to incorporating the film’s 2021 segments, which sees everyone’s least-favourite space oddity Zuckerberg (played rather weakly by Jeremy Strong) learning how to be human just hours before facing questions about the integrity of the site’s fact checking (of which there’s really little to speak of). The film uses a literal timeline that appears on screen and drags us from one year to the next, which might’ve been useful the first time we cut to Zuckerberg and Co, but feels superfluous everywhere else.
It would’ve been a treat to see Jesse Eisenberg return to bring us a whole new take on Zuckerberg sixteen years on, but it’s understandable that after years of basically being cast to do the same thing again in a handful of other films, he turned down the role here. Strong is just about okay as a replacement – the awkward modern Zuck must be an actor’s Kryptonite to play – but it’s hard to feel as though he’s the same man we saw hacking into computer systems from his Harvard dorm room, and outside of the same naming convention, there have been a lot of opportunities missed to properly tie these two films together to make them feel of a piece. That feels like a missed opportunity.
Despite my reservations (for a final note, I think keeping Trump out of the film’s third act conversations is a cowardly move), White and Madison have chemistry enough to carry this film over the finish line. The script isn’t Sorkin’s best, as mentioned, but it does say a lot to his strengths as a screenwriter that even when he’s operating at a lesser level, he’s still able to pepper his film with some good lines and beats to take home – some of which had my crowd laughing out loud.
The ending, too, leaves things on a note that’s narratively satisfying yet somewhat disconcerting for our future rather than the story of the film itself, but that’s a whole other conversation to have, one that’s very Meta indeed…
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong language.
The Social Reckoning is in cinemas now.
