The Social Reckoning is Aaron Sorkin at his exhilarating best
The Social Network (2010) has steadily grown in stature: “hands down” the best film of the 2010s, says Quentin Tarantino. Although its story concluded in 2008, by which time Mark Zuckerberg was the yo
T he Social Network (2010) has steadily grown in stature: “hands down” the best film of the 2010s, says Quentin Tarantino. Although its story concluded in 2008, by which time Mark Zuckerberg was the youngest billionaire in the world, it concentrated on his early days, back in 2004, when he was completely unknown, a 20-year-old underdog, made remarkably sympathetic by Jesse Eisenberg’s unmistakable intelligence.
The Social Reckoning , again scripted and, this time, also directed by Aaron Sorkin, has no sympathy for Zuckerberg, who is impersonated by Jeremy Strong ( Succession ’s Kendall Roy) as a chilly automaton, rigid and immobile, needing to be coached on basic human expression. He is virtually a Dalek.
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Mercifully, this film isn’t chiefly Zuckerberg’s story. It belongs to the whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked documents to the investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz about the impact Facebook was having on politics and society, resulting in the “Facebook Files” in the Wall Street Journal in 2021, followed by appearances in congressional hearings and on 60 Minutes .
Haugen’s own memoir about this, The Power of One (2023), is sanctimonious and dull, but Horwitz’s version, Broken Code (2024) , is more readable – and this is the book that has been adapted by Sorkin. In fact, he has made a rip-roaring, print-journalist hero drama of the kind that now seems wondrously anachronistic, perhaps destined to be the last such ever.
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