At the cold heart of The Social Network was the puzzle of Mark Zuckerberg—the character—who might or might not have necessarily resembled Mark Zuckerberg—the person—but certainly fit the bill as something of an enigma in Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for David Fincher’s movie (still a great one, by the way—as electric in its structuring as in its crackling dialogue). Through the writing and in Jesse Eisenberg’s performance, there was a possible solution to that puzzle, which is that Mark was always a keen observer (but not really a participant) of the human condition, usually in order to bend it to his will. That it was technically about the birth of what would become an enterprising social network was sort of incidental, because he could have been at the helm of just about any enterprising thing.
That was in 2010, when Facebook was only about a fourth of how old it is now, in a time when the use of this and many other social networks seems nearly as ubiquitous as the breathing of air. During the course of the original film’s story, the characters celebrated the millionth-member landmark, and in its coda, we learned that the site had drawn many more millions since its inception. At the start of The Social Reckoning, the titles inform us that the site now hosts more than 2 billion people—which, to undergird the math you just did on your fingers, is about one-sixth of the global population.
The world has become a scarier place since then, and after a prologue in which a woman goes viral for challenging a couple of police officers, we meet, essentially, one of the reasons why—though, in her initially rosy view of things, Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) genuinely believes she’s serving the mission of the site. That stated mission, which the original film established to be the recreation of the “college experience” online, has now morphed into a lot of corporate talking points about connection and friendship. What it actually seems to be is a very different beast.
Frances, who happens to have met in passing the woman in the viral video, gradually begins to realize that the radicalizing agent was the very site for which she now works in the civic integrity department—often under the icily watchful eye of Facebook’s media relations executive Teddy Marks (Billy Magnussen). In Mark’s (Jeremy Strong) circle are his crisis management specialist Raya (Wunmi Mosaku), who is preparing her boss for his testimony in front of the United States Congress, and a former investor (played by Bill Burr), with whom the co-founder of Facebook had a falling-out after a critical op-ed in a major publication caused an incidental amount of bad press. These are two of the major plot threads in the new screenplay by Sorkin (who also directs this time around).
For Frances, it means finding some kind of outlet for the data she has most recently been analyzing, which suggest a fundamental change to the algorithm that powers what we all refer to as “the feed.” That places her in the vicinity of Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a political investigative reporter from the Wall Street Journal who cares—at least, at first—a lot less about the social-media angle of the whole thing than the ramifications to the public and the freedoms of speech and the press. He’s the grounding element to the story, and White is quite good at both navigating the witticisms of Sorkin’s dialogue (Jeff barely understands anything about the tech he’s tasked to report by his editor, played by a no-nonsense Betty Gilpin, let alone what Frances dumps into his lap) and the gravity of what’s been unfolding all around him.
The real story, though, belongs to Frances and, especially, Madison, who gets a few monologues that set themselves apart from and slightly above the usual Sorkinian spin-cycle. Frances does understand the gravity of what’s been unfolding in large part thanks to her and her fellow civic integrity analysts, and the fear of reprisals, as well as the grip they hold upon her, are quietly devastating to witness. The actress, already established to be a very good one, holds her own here, and when the action is fixated upon her and the co-dependent but transactional relationship between the whistleblower and the reporter, the film’s message comes to vivid life.
Of far less interest, if only because it just seems to be a lot of exposition about what we already kind of knew about Facebook, are the scenes between Mark and his conference of handlers. A debate of sorts erupts about the benefits and the downsides to allowing disinformation into paid political ads, and then, a couple of national tragedies either gradually or instantly unfold, providing real-time examples of what Facebook’s algorithm hath wrought. The first one is the COVID-19 pandemic, and naturally, the second—and, oddly, graver, at least in the eyes of this movie—one is January 6, 2021, where the film weirdly frames the events of that day and the actions of the Oval Office’s occupant as the first true test to shake Mark Zuckerberg’s calm, cool, collected demeanor.
It’s not quite enough to take away from how absorbing the mainline story of The Social Reckoning is, but it does call attention to itself by way of Strong’s performance as the nebbish but detached once-prodigy, which attempts to do something with the man’s stonelike visage and, ultimately, kind of doesn’t do anything. The heart of this companion piece-cum-follow-up is even colder (not to mention more procedural by nature) than its predecessor, but it does still stand as a compelling and alarming warning of what this company is both willing and capable to do.
Rating: *** (out of ****)
Leave a comment