Imagine being such a distinct storyteller that your last name is synonymous with a whole language of film-making. It’s a privilege reserved exclusively for directors: Tarantino-esque, Spielbergian, Lynchian. But Aaron Sorkin is a screenwriter solely responsible for the cinema of ‘Sorkinisms’: a style of dialogue and atmosphere where humans speak faster than they think, flaunt intellectual credibility, exchange smug repartee without a single stutter, do deadpan jokes in a hurry, react without listening, unleash crowd-pleasing one-liners, and demonstrate robotic comfort with one another.
Sorkinisms keep the viewer entertained by jousting with them and challenging them to keep up — it’s not the plot that’s moving fast, it’s the people within it. It’s exhausting and enjoyable at once. Even when it gets on your nerves, it’s part of the plan. Think Amelia Dimoldenberg interviewing Jesse Eisenberg on Chicken Shop Date, but as an entire movie. Every (American) character is socially awkward, and sounds like a preprogrammed wit-bot or sadness-bot or monologue-bot or argument-bot. So it’s quite the irony that The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Sorkin, is centered on manipulative algorithms.
A follow-up to the fabled friendship-in-the-time-of-Silicon-Valley drama The Social Network (2010), The Social Reckoning is based on the inflection point of Facebook — and the beginning of its lengthy end. The heady days are over, the platform is in the crossheirs of the Congress, founder Mark Zuckerberg describes himself as a “professional defendant,” and the story leads up to the 2021 Facebook Files, an internal leak that proved a modern-day white-collar crime: a social-media platform’s complicity in the spread of misinformation, violence and radicalisation in a post-Trump era. It plays out as a whistleblower and journalism film, featuring a brave Facebook data scientist (Mikey Madison, as Frances Haugen) and a plucky Wall Street Journal reporter (Jeremy Allen White, as Jeff Horwitz) who broke the story. Jeremy Strong plays an older but not-wiser Zuckerberg, as an eccentric visionary who hides behind the ruse of free speech to prioritise profitability over morality.
The Social Reckoning is, by design, hard to get wrong. As in any whistleblower thriller, the cloaks-and-dagger tone makes it pacey and rhythmic; the stakes are considerably high (google the consequences of exposing a corporation like Boeing and you’ll know). The setting supplies it: the journalist and the engineer team up in the shadows of San Francisco, they meet in misty parks and trade secrets in his hotel room (she comes dressed as his date to avoid scrutiny), a mysterious ‘virus’ is starting to shut the world down and alter the grammar of communication, and at some point, she temporarily moves to tropical Puerto Rico during the work-from-home phase.
The two spar like siblings patronising each other; Frances has to explain technicalities from the bottom-up, and Jeff’s curiosity makes him deaf to her taunts. There are times when she’s thinking aloud about the science of the virus and the looming pandemic, but he’s wondering about the terms and timelines of the documents she leaks to him. Their nervous energy and anxieties draw out the most dysfunctional conversations. Indian viewers, like myself, are grateful for small mercies like the two ‘heroes’ not getting romantically involved; they’re good-looking and sharp, and their edgy retorts can easily be construed as flirting. Fortunately this is based on real people who formed a mutually dependent — and hence platonic — connection. Frances and Jeff may behave like isolated individuals with no past or backstory, but the film stays focused on viewing them through the courage of their collaboration; nothing more, nothing less.
It’s all very Sorkin-esque (another adjective, there you go), where two unlikely underdogs embark on an espionage mission in enemy territory. The suspense lies in their struggle to stay undetected, and legal, in a place where digital eyes and ears are everywhere. The director in Sorkin has a unique feel for how his words land on screen. One-liners like “Democracy is the best form of government, it isn’t the best form of everything” and “my bias against tech isn’t that they’re taking journalism jobs, it’s that they’re doing it so badly,” and a boomer jibe about the term ‘mansplaining’ (“it’s the term women use when they’re losing an argument”) are timed to get gasps and muted claps out of the audience. The reason they're so effective is because these sentences often appear as a momentary release — a brief puncturing of intellectual pressure — during dense chats and rat-a-tat exchanges. The viewer is asked to breathe and admire the opinion-coded quotes; we can rest only if we hang onto these thoughts.
The performances lean into this template, where important words act as air pockets in a deluge of vocal prompts; it’s like watching a romcom where the love story is between the writer and his mind. It is however a good move to center the narrative on Frances, the nerd who genuinely believes in Facebook until she doesn’t. She loves her job, which is why her transformation is fuelled more by heartbreak than righteousness. She keeps repeating to Jeff that she’s not some jilted employee, and that she always trusted the ‘democratisation’ of expression that social media platforms are supposed to stand for. Her annoyance with Jeff — where she has to simplify everything to him because he’s not a tech reporter — is almost deliberate; she’s looking for ways to verbalise her disillusionment and justify her risky actions. Jeremy Allen White’s Jeff has tunnel vision (a less-toxic ‘chef’ going for the kill), so the few glimpses of empathy from either of them come as plot twists of sorts. It can be satisfying for viewers desensitised by the otherwise-mechanical microaggressions on screen. Jeff’s scenes at work bring to mind the boss-intern and caustic editor-reporter banter from his television shows (The Newsroom, The West Wing): part grating, part patriotism-dressed-as-ethics.
But not getting it wrong isn’t the same as making a bullet-proof film. The Social Reckoning is happy to be fine and functional. There’s often a sense that Sorkin could’ve done this in his sleep. It’s his comfort zone, his ‘jam’ if you may, and this results in the kind of familiarity and matter-of-factness that seldom amounts to something groundbreaking. When Sorkin’s scripts are directed by other accomplished film-makers (like David Fincher and Bennett Miller), they find a stillness — a visual or sensory undercurrent — that shapes and tames the meaty chaos around. This soul goes missing when he directs his own screenplays, because it becomes about erasing the pauses to hit as many beats as possible. It’s like a well-traveled tourist who’s researched a new trip so hard that the mission is to visit as many spots as possible, not linger anywhere. Or a better analogy: if Fincher’s The Social Network is a Michelin-starred street-food restaurant, Sorkin’s film is the popular burger joint that wins influencer awards. It’s tasty at best, not memorable.
There are a few optical issues with The Social Reckoning, too. Strong plays Zuckerberg as if his character Kendall Roy from Succession was actually powerful; he amplifies the Dracula-working-in-daylight vibe to make the maximum impact in the few scenes he has. The famously immersive actor goes for broke, in the process turning Zuckerberg into a pale looney-tunes villain. It’s fun to watch maybe, but given that the framing device is similar to Steve Jobs — where the conflicted billionaire is seen prepping for an ‘event’ with his close aides and publicists — Strong makes his culpability look too…obvious. There’s also the cloying sentimentality of Hollywood storytelling: particularly the way it ties the epilogue of a racist white lady with the 2021 Capitol riots towards the end, or a clumsy fist-bump moment that would’ve looked more at home in Moneyball.
Then there’s the elephant in the room. Sorkin’s movies do very well to create an illusion of cleverness and omniscience, but the crisis of The Social Reckoning is a little too dated to seem clever. We’re way past the fake-news and misinformation and online-fascism epidemic, well into the dystopian AI and jobs-ending age, so the movie faces an uphill battle in terms of ‘revealing’ an urgent conspiracy. In this age of rapidly escalating technology, getting radicalised and conditioned by social media is almost a medieval problem. It’s unlike The Social Network in 2010, which arrived at the peak of the social-media boom; it didn’t wait for the world to move onto newer doomsdays. It’s harder to care for something that’s already normalised, especially when the film-making counts on the smartness of investigation and gotcha tropes. As the kids say today: Facebook is so yesterday. Perhaps it can be seen as a reminder: an origin story of the hellscape we log onto these days. Or perhaps it’s just a period drama that recalls the week we discovered the predatory nature of machines — by scrolling on our devices.