Off the Mark: On Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning”

 

Everyone loves a journalism movie. We love Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford on the trail of Watergate in All the President’s Men; we adore Holly Hunter and William Hurt figuring out what honest reporting looks like in Broadcast News; we are enamored of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell bickering out of one side of their mouths in His Girl Friday. Movies set in the Fourth Estate feel nearly as institutional as the offices they’re set in. Typically, the thrill of a journalism movie is in witnessing the process. Viewers want the excitement and hard work that go into breaking a huge story. Aaron Sorkin’s latest film The Social Reckoning, which dramatizes the 2021 Facebook whistleblower leaks, leaves viewers wanting more in this regard: more nosing around for sources, more poring over documents, more assembling the disparate pieces into a coherent whole.

Those familiar with Sorkin’s work know he is drawn to courtroom and courtroom-adjacent settings. These spaces grant Sorkin institutional gravitas and a real flesh-and-blood audience in the form of lawyers, judges, or other participants. Even Emily Mortimer’s MacKenzie McHale on The Newsroom, Sorkin’s TV drama about a fictional broadcast news network, pronounced, “That studio is a courtroom. And we only call expert witnesses.” Audiences may have forgotten (myself included) that Sorkin and David Fincher’s millennial masterpiece The Social Network, a “companion piece” to The Social Reckoning, is narratively built around a pair of depositions. In those deposition scenes, Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg stares daggers at Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin and Armie Hammer’s Winklevoss twins while making pithy remarks about his own intellectual superiority. In Sorkin’s Molly’s Game, one key scene is a criminal arraignment. In The Trial of the Chicago 7, Sokin goes full legal drama. In The Social Reckoning, Sorkin gives viewers the courtroom with a twist: a Senate subcommittee hearing. If all the world’s a stage, the Capitol Building has the best acoustics for Sorkin to hear his own voice.