Anti-Social Media: THE SOCIAL RECKONING

Conventional wisdom on 2010’s Facebook founding drama The Social Network says it’s David Fincher’s direction that makes it great. It's his camera and pacing and precise work with actors that gives it an ice cold framing and a speeding momentum and an endlessly quotable, densely characterized snappiness. But that really does short change screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s contributions. Even on the page it’s one of the great films of this century. Next time you watch it keep an ear on the structure of the interleaving deposition timelines and the dimensionality of character and intent in each conversation. The movie’s complexity is enhanced by the direction, but the screenplay is the foundation that lets it reach those aims. It’s the mix of the two that makes magic. 

And it’s the lack of the two that leaves its new follow up, The Social Reckoning, feeling pretty flat. Sorkin directs his own writing here. He’ll never be mistaken for being as distinctive a director as he is a writer. Not a big surprise the new movie is typically flat and simply staged. Those are the aesthetic decisions, or lack thereof, you’d make if all you wanted to do was letting writing and performance take center stage. But what’s most surprising is how the writing falls short, too. For all his idiosyncratic tendencies, Sorkin can write verbal pyrotechnics as well as anyone. Here it’s all expositional with a light dusting of the chewy self-righteous monologues for which he’s best known. It’s thinner and more utilitarian, more interested in making its points than building its world. If the first film couldn’t go more than a couple minutes without a memorable line, building complicated characters through a hurtling startup story in action, this one’s mostly about people explaining things to each other when they aren’t clicking around. 

Founder Mark Zuckerberg is now a villain lurking in a subplot, caring more about preserving power and time users spend on his site than the social consequences of the platform he runs. He’s played by Jeremy Strong, a good substitution from the original’s Jesse Eisenberg, if only because Eisenberg can never totally remove likability, or at least easy charisma, from his screen persona. Strong plays him as a total blank cocooned from real pushback and warped by a core belief shaped by oppositional defiance. He takes any criticism as impetus to get even worse. If the earlier movie was about how one young man’s antisocial tendencies were inflicted upon the rest of us, the follow-up’s Reckoning is all about what’s happening to the rest of us 20 years on. This movie’s mainly about a whistleblower (Mikey Madison) contacting an investigative reporter (Jeremy Allen White) to raise alarm about internal studies that show harmful effects of Facebook and its assorted social media products. He asks questions. She sneaks documents. Repeat. Meanwhile Zuck preps for a senate hearing with the help of friendly (Wunmi Mosaku) and combative (Bill Burr) interlocutors. All the while, COVID and the January 6th riots loom in the near future as the movie cuts between 2019 and 2021. 

The movie’s not particularly equipped to do anything with all these potentially provocative and productive juxtapositions other than asserting that social media is a social ill. It so obviously is, and it is nice to rehearse the reasons why. We’ve hooked our society and our economy up to these machines that pump poison into the body politic, accelerating radicalization and bullying and the collapse of objective truth. That’s a project that happens to flatter certain would-be authoritarians in our corporate-political landscape. And it leaves the rest of us worse off. But despite this movie’s good intentions and research, the project doesn’t work as drama or as documentary. It’s a pleasantly mediocre hybrid, flattering the assumptions of people who walk in ready to be just as angry. And even they might be surprised how sedate and surface-level the results are here. 

Truth or Consequences: VERITY

Verity, like other Colleen Hoover adaptations, is a twisty melodrama with the dynamics so heightened you get a little dizzy from the altitude sickness. But somehow taking the emphasis off of damaged lovers’ romances, like in It Ends with Us or Regretting You, and into a more straightforward sexy thriller makes for a more effective result. The long simmering tensions bubbling up into straight-faced delirium make sense in this context. It also gives its cast something to hide. This works better to subsume the wildest twists behind doubts and deceptions until the last possible moment. Dakota Johnson stars as a young author hired to sign a non-disclosure agreement and help a troubled bestselling novelist finish her popular series. Anne Hathaway plays the wealthy writer in a deceptive double role in slippery flashbacks and a struggling present. Josh Hartnett is her husband, a nice, supportive guy. Is that suspicious in a movie like this? Johnson moves into their home to sort through outlines and notes and, no surprise, starts formulating her own opinions about the couple’s dynamic as she’s learns about their past and gets entangled in their futures. 

The material makes good use of its cast’s strengths. Johnson, who here has a fine inquisitive blankness to her “resting bored face,” spends most of the movie very slowly reading a secret manuscript that may be a hidden confession to Terrible Deeds, and then wandering the mansion talking to its inhabitants. That each chapter ends on shocking revelations does little to speed her to the end. It’s a sensible chapter a day for this one, the better to string the movie along. It gives Hathaway time to play a wide range of modes, from fresh flirt, to postpartum psychosis, to wounded wife. And Hartnett keeps his chemistry with each woman on a low boil to keep you guessing about his ultimate goal. That the movie is self-consciously playing with the truth and perspective, from the title on down, makes it the kind of smart that people who don’t usually think too hard will find provocative. The rest of us can just vibe with the smooth surfaces’ appeal coaxed along by workmanlike direction and a screenplay that has just the right balance of dread and silliness. From the pretty people to the 80’s-style fonts to the lumbering ominous pace to the trip-wire twists to the fact that all of the bestselling author’s books are designed to look exactly like Hoover’s, it’s a pleasantly unpleasant pulp. 

Down and Out: DIGGER

And here I thought the one bright spot of the end of the world would be respite from having to hear about the ghoulish billionaires and waxworks politicians causing it. What Digger supposes is we’d still be telling their story in the dark ages to come. It’s meant to be funny. Sometimes it is. It’s also a nightmare. Writer-director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s work has always played best as dark comedy, despite generally wearing the clothes of serious dramatic art. What is the grim survivalist revenge picture The Revenant if not a bleakly funny pile-on of insult and injury in stunning snowy western landscapes? Or how about the misrerabilist everything-is-connected globalism drama Babel? Its ice-cold framing of overheated dramatic twists has a bleary pile-up of tragedy that’s by turns moving and absurd. It stands to reason his Birdman, the most transparently comedic of his films, is his only Oscar Best Picture, what with its self-consciously showbiz showy one-take gimmick swirling around chewy monologues in the mouths of actors playing actors behind the scenes of a play. His latest is a bit of all of the above, mixed with a Yorgos Lanthimos straight-faced cynicism in the face of fish-eyed weirdness and a Wes Anderson conscious artifice and precisely ornate production design in a nesting doll narrative about narrative. 

It stars Tom Cruise, made more believably his mid-60s age with a dusting of makeup effects, as Digger, a tyrannical oil executive whose life is upended when he learns his drilling has broken off a chunk of glacier the size of Pittsburgh. Said iceberg is in a fast current on a collision course with the European coast. Disaster will ensue. The end of the world, even. The film quickly involves the United States’ government, as embodied by a tottering, quick-tempered, narcissistic president (John Goodman) and his staff of toadies and yes men, including a whimpering Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), snarling military men, and a pastor, all fervently praying with nationalistic fervor. The point is clear. There’s a toxic blend of corporate, religious, and political corruption gassing each other up and midwifing the apocalypse. It’s what Naomi Klein’s latest book calls End Times Fascism, and Iñárritu’s on the case. He’s never a subtle director, and here the stylistic pyrotechnics and thematic points alike are blasted out with a loud lack of subtlety. All the subtext is buried about half an inch deep at best until scene after scene dusts it off and presents it for our double-underlined awareness. And then (here I’ll be freely discussing what the film takes a half an hour to reveal, so reader beware) it’s revealed that we’re many years after the events in question, and we’re watching tech rehearsal for an improbably technically elaborate stage show revival of a play called Fossil Fools. It’s fools all the way down.

The movie’s a collection of good scenes that never quite cohere. The pale, filmic framing and layered artifice from Emmanuel Lubezki remains beguiling throughout. The actors storm and rage and flail in convincing satiric modes bolstered by thundering dialogue. (The supporting cast also includes Sandra Hüller and Riz Ahmed and Jesse Plemons; it’s a whole movie of scene-stealers given the material to fill their time well.) But the cumulative effect is somehow both too complicated and too obvious to support the architecture around it. We’re placed at a remove both from the story in the story and the frame story. The play never really makes sense as a production, and it’s difficult to see why it appeals to the audience gathering to watch it. Nor do we have enough to understand the people putting on the play—they’re more stock type like Director and Producer and Actor. And being stuck in the theater with them gives us a cramped view of a wider world. It’s a hermetic, caustically angry, omnidirectional cynical movie. That it surges to life on the back of its committed cast and aesthetic curlicues makes it watchable and fascinating, even if never entirely successful. It’s perhaps best viewed as a star text for Cruise, who is, after all, playing his first new character in nearly a decade. He’s both an earnest actor fumbling through backstage family drama—a missing daughter, no less!—and a bloviating deep-fried billionaire trapped in his own mausoleum-like mansion where the only thing his wealth has earned him is isolation and futility. It'll take a dissertation to disentangle all those threads. It’s a movie where you might think appreciating the effortful artistry on display is almost enough to recommend sitting through it.