Richard Brody’s review of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning turns on a useful distinction: explaining a political scandal is not the same thing as making a film. The story follows Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen and reporter Jeff Horwitz, but Brody argues that its people become instruments for delivering information rather than characters with lives beyond the plot.
- Procedure gets texture: employee outreach, covert meetings, burner phones, and the practical limits of handling a source’s documents.
- Character gets compressed: Haugen and Horwitz bond over literature and movies, yet their personalities remain tightly tethered to the investigation.
- Institutional scale is not dramatic depth: corporate power, Congress, the pandemic, and January 6 supply enormous stakes without necessarily opening up the world on screen.
- The camera matters: Brody contrasts Sorkin’s neutral recording of performances with David Fincher’s exacting portraiture in The Social Network.
- Talent cannot do everything: Mikey Madison suggests depths in Haugen that, in Brody’s assessment, the film’s images never pursue.
The sharpest criticism is that even a villain can become a shortcut. Reducing corporate power to an emblematic bad person risks reproducing the rage-bait logic the story wants to expose, while leaving the institutional questions underexplored.
A worthwhile argument about political art: the right subject and worthy intentions do not replace curiosity about people, the surrounding world, or the expressive possibilities of the medium.