The Social Reckoning: A Review (Review #2233)

THE SOCIAL RECKONING

I am not much on Facebook. I was never a devotee of the platform. While I do have an account, I have gone weeks to months without so much as looking at it. Therefore, I wonder if I would be the target audience for The Social Reckoning. I cannot say whether or not The Social Reckoning can truly be called a sequel to The Social Network. I can say that The Social Reckoning is misdirected on a myriad of levels.  

The Social Reckoning is divided into four sections. We have Prologue: White Girl Wasted, then Part One: Cassandra, Part Two: Meaningful Social Interaction (MSI) and Part Three: We're Going to Get Blamed for This. The film hopes hither and yon from 2019 to 2021, flipping back and forth along with way. I'll try to give a more straightforward synopsis.

Prologue: White Girl Wasted has us encounter Kaylee (Portia Doubleday). She is both stranded on the side of the road and visibly intoxicated. Two officers, one male and one female, attempt to help but find that Kaylee is obnoxious, entitled, and defensive. Kaylee, who is white, decides to videotape her encounter with these obviously racist cops. She belittles the black man and the Hispanic woman, down to threatening them. This is all livestreamed and uploaded to the Voices of Reason Facebook page, which is, I think, alt-right.

As it so happens, Kaylee was once a friend to a Facebook employee, Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison). Frances is surprised and dismayed because she remembers when Kaylee was a firm progressive. As a Facebook employee, Frances feels some responsibility for her friend having been radicalized from progressive to alt-right. Frances works for the Civic Integrity Group section in Facebook but has concerns.  While she believes in Facebook's claims of wanting to connect people, she thinks that the company does not care about its users. No one will listen to her Cassandra-like warnings. No one appears to know who the mythical Cassandra was either.

Into this comes Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). He's a political reporter, not a tech one. He couldn't even figure out how to use the GPS to get to the San Francisco office on time. Nevertheless, there is a story here, and Horwitz will find it. Horwitz is a threat to Facebook, which quakes at the mention of his name. Fortunately for him, Frances has decided to become whistleblower. She does not want her name used nor to hand over documents. Jeff does his best with his inside source, nicknamed "Fred". San Francisco Wall Street Journal bureau chief Christina (Betty Gilpin) hates the name but won't let Jeff change it.

Wrong Fred

COVID hits, and initially Frances is allowed to work in Puerto Rico remotely. The CIG is eliminated, and now Facebook wants to go into Meaningful Social Interactions (MSI). This will allegedly increase interaction. What it does is put profit over people and allow all sorts of dangerous information and groups to infiltrate, manipulate and recruit people to their nefarious worldview. Eventually, Frances opts to go all-in to secure the documents and even reveal her identity.

In the future, Facebook CEO Mark Zukerberg (Jeremy Strong) is being coached and trained on how to answer at a Congressional hearing. His handler Raya (Wunmi Mosaku) struggles to get Zuckerberg to come across as human. His various lackeys fret about what kind of tie he should wear. Only former Facebook investor Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr) is able to speak truth to power. Charlie's continuing sniping at Zuckerberg irks the latter, who openly questions why Charlie is there given that he sold his Facebook shares and lives to tell Zuckerberg off. This training day culminates with the riot on January 6, 2021, which Facebook is responsible in part for. As everyone watches in horror as the Capitol building burns to the ground, Zuckerberg finally orders "shut it down" (meaning the various pages that instigated the second fall of Washington).

Frances Haugen gives her own Congressional testimony and does something she never thought she could. She pumps her arm in the air. 

I was a bit facetious with some of my The Social Reckoning summary. The January 6 riot did not literally burn the Capitol building to the ground. I think the riot was monstrous and a sign of the overall sickness in our political discord. I take this tone, however, because The Social Reckoning takes itself far too seriously. We see and hear this at Fraces' testimony which closes out the film. As Alexandre Deplat's swelling music plays, we hear Frances' lengthy statements about the dangers and greed of Facebook. I get where writer/director Aaron Sorkin is going with this. He wants us to see this as a triumph of the human spirit, a moment where we the audience will see our heroine rising while lifting up the nation to the light of universal truth.

It is unfortunate, though, that Sorkin never built up this moment. He would have done better to let her testimony speak for itself (no pun intended). The music, apart from being almost cartoonishly exaggerated in its nobility, is cliched and veers dangerously close to parody. Nobility is earned, not granted, at least in this case.

Right from the start, The Social Reckoning is almost universally poorly acted. The entire Prologue scene has some of the worst, exaggerated acting that I have seen this year. It is as if Sorkin told his three actors (Doubleday, Sierra Capri as Deputy Diaz and Michael Braugher as Deputy Otumbo) to be as silly and over-the-top as they could be. Doubleday is probably the worst. She was a parody of a parody of an entitled girl with "white privilege". Capri and Braugher were just saying lines. They weren't convincing as these deputies. The fact that we had a black man and a Hispanic woman facing off against this obnoxious white female lends itself to suggestions that it felt a bit too pat.

Furthermore, we never saw Kaylee's radicalization from progressive to alt-right. We just had to take Frances' word for it. I'm not even sure that we saw a scene where Kaylee and Frances ever interacted.

It is not just the smaller roles that were so poorly directed. You have an Oscar winner, an Emmy winner and a couple of Oscar nominees in The Social Reckoning. For reasons that only Sorkin may know, they were all apparently directed to speak their lines as if they were in a screwball comedy. Just about everyone in The Social Reckoning has a staccato-like delivery in their dialogue. The rapid-fire patter between Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White was cringeworthy. Constant quips about how Horwitz was technologically inept and how Haugen loved her job soon became dumb. Near the end, Haugen snapped at Horwitz, "Did you go to a Baptist school where math was like witchcraft?". That came across as bizarre. Earlier, Horwitz was asked to settle a debate at the Wall Street Journal office. "Is 'spatula' a Yiddish word?", he's asked. You sit there and wonder, "Are they serious?".

Let's get to the best performance in The Social Reckoning. In this case, though, "best" is damning with faint praise. Jeremy Strong is an excellent actor. If the goal was to make Mark Zuckerberg into a human audio-animatronic figure, then Strong and Sorkin succeeded beyond anything they could have aimed for. Strong gave us an excellent impersonation of Zuckerberg, capturing his voice convincingly. However, I do not know if making Zuckerberg into a person unaware of how to interact with others be they employees or lackeys was a good idea. The real Mark Zuckerberg may be robotic. However, The Social Reckoning's Mark Zuckerberg is a robot in all but name.

It does not help matter when Bill Burr pops up throughout Zuckerberg's training. Who is he? Why is he there? Why does he get allowed and away with making snippy comments about Zuckerberg and Facebook? At one point, Zuckerberg himself asks why Charlie is there. It is a perfectly valid question.

Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White, as mentioned, are not well-served by Sorkin's screenplay or directing. Every time Madison's Frances speaks to others, she comes across as more updated version of Zuckerberg's audio-animatronic figure. Right from the start, when she is prevented from asking a question to Facebook media guru Teddy Marks (Billy Magnussen), we see Frances less as a noble figure who grew disillusioned with Facebook's direction than a perpetual scold. Whether in dealing with disinterested employees, disastrous dates or clueless journalists, Frances seems only able to correct people.

Other elements also fail. Frances' few efforts at dating seem to be there to show how her arrogant dates take Facebook misinformation at face value. Horwitz has two interns, Zach (Adrian Zepete) and Evelyn (Kelly Pereira). They endure Horwitz's clumsy management and at one point end up schtupping. The who, why, when, where or how of any of their subplot is thrown out there but never fully introduced or used. 

As mentioned, Alexandre Desplat's score lays it on far too thick in its efforts to be stirring or tense. At one point, Desplat uses a somber drumming that is supposed to be menacing. The end result, judging from the audience reaction, was laughter. 

As a side note, The Social Reckoning made me think how short both Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White are. The former is listed as 5'3.5" and the latter is listed as 5'7". In their various scenes together, they both look quite tiny. I do not know why that stood out.

This is more The Social Wrecking than The Social Reckoning. Well-intentioned by poorly guided, The Social Reckoning never made its case as to why Facebook is the danger the film thinks it is. Friends don't let friends make bad movies.

DECISION: D+