Film what you know, they say, and what Aaron Sorkin knows, above all, is show business. That’s why “Being the Ricardos,” his 2021 bio-pic about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, is one of the most insightful recent behind-the-scenes dramas. As the story of a minor actress becoming what would now be called a showrunner of genius, it’s energized by Sorkin’s similar career arc and the passions that have fuelled it. This is already a glance askance at Sorkin’s new film, “The Social Reckoning,” about the whistle-blower whose revelations, in 2021, shook Facebook. Sorkin wrote and directed it, and his self-proclaimed unfamiliarity with the tech world makes itself felt in both domains. The failure isn’t in his view of the digital nuts and bolts of social media but in the mind-set, the psychology of characters in that field.
“The Social Reckoning” is, of course, a natural sequel to “The Social Network” (2010), the film that Sorkin wrote about the founding of Facebook. There he keenly discerned that what mattered to the still adolescent Mark Zuckerberg about the technology he wielded was the prominence that it gave him in his own social realm; it was a script about varieties of power. But what made the movie more than a pat tale of outsider arrogance, what gave the movie its excitement and its energy, was its direction, by David Fincher, who is himself something of a tech whiz of a filmmaker. Fincher’s sophisticated methods were deployed to create a portrait of a nerd protagonist (played by Jesse Eisenberg) who glowed with a mysterious and wondrous inner illumination of genius—genius here coming off as an aesthetically extreme but morally neutral quality.
In “The Social Reckoning,” Zuckerberg (now played by Jeremy Strong) is more of a supporting role, but, even when he’s offscreen, he remains the central subject. The movie centers on an investigative reporter named Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) who, in 2019, joins the Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau, and on a Facebook employee named Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), who starts providing Jeff with insider information about changes to the platform’s algorithm—mandated by Zuckerberg—that boosted posts a colleague calls “rage bait,” including conspiracy theories, disinformation, and hate-mongering.
Sorkin is palpably fascinated by the maneuvers of journalism: the movie is rich in practicalities of the trade, as when Jeff, trying to penetrate the wall of secrecy that protects Facebook’s internal policies and practices, recruits a pair of interns, Evelyn (Kelley Pereira) and Zach (Aidan Laprete), to write individualized letters to hundreds of the company’s employees via LinkedIn.