Tag Archives: Aaron Sorkin

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A Helluva Drug

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The Social Reckoning

by Hope Madden & George Wolf

Back in 2010—aah, that innocent time—writer Aaron Sorkin (with writer Ben Mezrich) took us behind the curtain to witness the weaselly, insecure, creepy underpinning of the social media revolution.

With The Social Reckoning, writer/director Sorkin checks back in on Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) to see how his social network was doing between 2018 – 2021. A less innocent time for all involved.

But “Zuck” is not the main character. This is the story of whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook engineer who loves her job on the Civic Integrity team and believes in the mission to connect people. But she can no longer live with Facebook and Zuckerberg’s intentional misuse of research to amplify profits while knowingly damaging users’ mental health, public safety, and democracy itself.

If The Social Network was a warning, The Social Reckoning is less an “I told you so” than a “holy shit!”

Haugen slowly learns to trust Wall Street Journal investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) with what she knows, hoping he can expose the corporate malfeasance, and her dream job can go back to being dreamy.

Sorkin’s films work best when he’s dealing with hyper intelligent characters, and that’s certainly the case here.  His spectacular cast, including Betty Gilpin, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen, and Bill Burr, is on point in every scene. The banter between the analog Horwitz and the tech-intensive Haugen is often delightful, bringing a low-key levity to the otherwise very high-key script.

The film’s pace juggles timelines efficiently, allowing Sorkin to make a sly juxtaposition of two viruses and use a data scientist’s “dumbed down” explanations to an old school journalist as the perfectly organic vehicle for bringing us all into their circle of trust. The Oscar-winning Madison is terrific, revealing hurt and disillusion as Haugen’s belief that social media reveals the best of us is crushed by the realization that her employer is knowingly manufacturing our worst.

White becomes a wonderful counterpoint, a more world-weary soul careful to protect his prized source while patiently encouraging her instincts to expose what she knows.

And Jeremy Strong turns in yet another award-worthy supporting turn as a real person. He takes the cutthroat glimpses of Zuck we saw from Jesse Eisenberg and molds them into a cold and detached tycoon, eager to proclaim his devotion to the “public square” while quietly giving bigger bullhorns to the town criers that are most profitable.

Anyone with a social feed knows that anger is a helluva drug, and when the company line fears blowback more than incitement, fires get stoked early and often.

Scenes with Zuck conferring in a lair with investors prove there are still spots where Sorkin can’t resist the urge to overstate the obvious and push one preachy beat too hard. But, man, then he’ll unleash a string of intelligent, well-stated and completely engaging points, counterpoints and rebuttals (often between Strong and Burr in the film’s most fiery moments) that right the ship right quick.

Even if you haven’t followed the story of Haugen, Horwitz and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Facebook Files, The Social Reckoning probably won’t surprise you with how obscene this all has become. But it might help you reconsider your own algorithms, and it will definitely remind you of the type of courage and integrity that still defines the best of us.

I mean, really, how many of us still think that social media was a good idea?

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Ballin’

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Being the Ricardos

by Hope Madden

Nicole Kidman does not look like Lucille Ball. Javier Bardem does not look like Desi Arnaz. You’ll forget that not long into Being the Ricardos, a change of pace for writer/director Aaron Sorkin.

Sorkin’s biopic shadows the couple through one particularly tumultuous week in their lives as a married couple as well as TV superstars.

Kidman has the voice, the attitude, and the wearied wit to bring Lucille Ball to life. Her brittle, believable turn grapples with the pressures of being Hollywood’s most bankable comic genius. Lucille Ball was the biggest TV star on earth, a massive moneymaking machine whose eye for physical comedy and ear for lazy comic riffs elevated content and deflated co-stars and co-workers. Kidman plays a boss pretending not to be the boss and bristling at the compromise.

Those populating the soundstage and writers room around her — Nina Arianda, Tony Hale, Alia Shawkat and a bland Jake Lacy — create a fractured work dynamic looking to collapse under this particular week’s unprecedented pressure due to a leaked news story about Lucy.

Besides Kidman, the two big standouts are not surprising. JK Simmons, who’s never turned in an unremarkable performance in his life, wrestles with a character who would be easy to dismiss or despise. In the veteran’s hands, though, William Frawley (I Love Lucy’s Fred Mertz) is the tender, well-meaning if wrong-headed voice of the times.

Bardem oozes charm, charisma and aptitude as Ball’s under-regarded husband. Vanity and vulnerability roil quietly, almost out of sight, and Bardem’s chemistry with Kidman sparkles.

Being the Ricardos is not funny, and it’s hard to fathom a film about Ball that isn’t at least incidentally funny. But let’s be honest, comedy is not really Sorkin’s bag. The way he looks at success, particularly for a woman at this time period, is as smart as anything he’s done.

Sorkin reins in his characteristic rat-a-tat-tat hyper-intellectual dialog just enough to let characters be human. Their on-screen personas meet their off-screen realities in a way that allows a firmly remarkable cast to deliver twice the goods.

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Hot Hand

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Molly’s Game

by Hope Madden

As screenwriters go, few have as noticeable a presence as Aaron Sorkin. A Sorkin screenplay = smart people saying smart things really quickly, over top of each other, often while walking.

His are dialogue-driven character pieces where brilliant people throw intellectual and moral challenges at one another while the audience wonders whether the damaged protagonist’s moral compass can still find true north.

That struggling hero this time around is Molly Bloom, played by the always-sharp Jessica Chastain. On first blush, the idea that Sorkin—directing his first feature—would choose to focus on a gossip-page celebrity criminal seems wrong. Bloom became tabloid fodder after her arrest made her high stakes, celebrity-filled poker games big news.

Gossip is not Sorkin’s wheelhouse, but unsung, solitary brilliance is and that’s what he hopes you see in Bloom, an Olympic-class skier with Harvard Law plans who found herself hosting insane poker games before realizing she had the wherewithal to build an epically lucrative business.

This is clear movie-of-the-week stuff elevated to something worthwhile because Sorkin is more interested in the evolution and entrapment of a brilliant mind than he is in movie stars playing poker. Although there is some of that, too, and it is provocatively handled by Michael Cera.

Playing against type and relishing the opportunity, Cera’s “Player X”—the Big Movie Star who just likes to ruin lives—is a spoiled brat and the performance is stand-out nasty.

The always underused Idris Elba is underused but excellent as Bloom’s reluctant-but-coming-around attorney Charley Jaffe. His slower, looser style counters Chastain’s machine gun cadence and the chemistry helps to keep the courtroom preparation interesting.

The problem with Molly’s Game—aside from its sometimes amazing similarities to Chastain’s 2016 courtroom drama Miss Sloane—are its many Sorkinisms. Chastain opens the film with an incredibly lengthy voiceover monologue providing all Molly’s backstory in the film’s first big misfire, but the almost dream-sequence bad scene between Molly and her psychoanalyst father (Kevin Costner) on a park bench is nearly insurmountable, Sorkin fan or no.

Appreciating Molly’s Game helps if you are a Sorkin fan. He has a particular style and, since he’s directing this one as well, there is no getting away from that style. There’s no David Fincher or Danny Boyle to supply a bit of visual flair to offset all of Sorkin’s writerly tendencies. Sorkin is everywhere, which is not necessarily a bad thing if you like sharp performances about smart people doing fascinating things.