Which is why it’s something of a surprise that The Social Reckoning moves along as briskly as it does. This is an account of how Wall Street Journal writer Jeff Horwitz (played here by Jeremy Allen White) cracked the story of how, ahead of the 2020 election, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg essentially encouraged the amplification of extremist views, a factor that fed directly into the violent January 6 attack on the Capitol. Horwitz can’t write that story alone; he enlists the clandestine help of a loyal Facebook engineer—part of the organization’s civic integrity team—who has become skeptical of certain company policies. Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) at first offers only minimal information; she loves her job and doesn’t want to lose it. But the deeper she digs into Facebook’s sinister practices of promoting rage bait to increase engagement, the more disenchanted she becomes.
Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison in The Social Reckoning —Courtesy of Sony
Maybe that’s thanks, in part, to Sorkin’s casting choices. Zuckerberg is played by shapeshifter du jour Jeremy Strong, who radiates a kind of robotic clamminess. In many of his scenes, he’s ensconced in a mock Congressional hearing, overseen by a “crisis specialist” (played by a take-no-prisoners Wunmi Mosaku) who has been hired to make him more likable, a Sisyphean task if ever there were one. He sits, straight-backed and tense, in a dark suit, working terrifically hard at the task of appearing human. At one point in the film, when he’s grilled about his company’s role in promoting the views of hate groups, he snaps, “We’re a corkboard. We don’t control what people pin to it.” Strong is attracted to playing unlikable people, and he’s good at it, though often—as with his portrayal of fixer extraordinaire Roy Cohn in The Apprentice—he offers a dash of tempered sympathy to remind us that these people are actually human. Not so with Zuckerberg: he focuses almost solely on the tech oligarch’s calculating, evasive nature. It’s the right choice.
As Horwitz, White serves up a classic, muted portrayal of a guy so dedicated to his job that he’s seriously fun-deprived. Oddly enough, it takes a smart, ultra-serious tech engineer to loosen him up, and his scenes with Madison, in which their characters banter and spar, are the movie’s best. At one point he refers to Frances as a Cassandra, citing the story of the cursed Trojan princess who has the gift of predicting the future, though no one believes her. Only he’s mangled and misapplied the myth; Frances sets him straight, and fills him in on the correct metaphorical meaning of Chicken Little and the Boy Who Cried Wolf as well. It’s Madison who anchors the movie. Frances wears studious-schoolgirl glasses, and she suffers from neuropathy: In chilly San Francisco, she needs to bundle up in chunky leg warmers and wristlets to keep numbness at bay—this garb gives her a waifish air. At one point she describes herself as “the girl in class with her hand raised that nobody wants the teacher to call on.” That’s a mouthful of classic Sorkinese if ever there were one, but as she spins the words out, Madison is so plaintive that she makes you see that girl. Frances Haugen is the conscience and the true hero of The Social Reckoning, and Sorkin knows it. He practically hands the movie over to Madison, and even in a movie filled with talking—and often with guys talking—it’s her stalwart yet unassuming presence that makes it sing.
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