Everyone walked into The Social Reckoning looking for Mark Zuckerberg. The early coverage has been a referendum on Jeremy Strong against Jesse Eisenberg, and on whether Aaron Sorkin can direct his own pages without David Fincher behind him. Those are fair questions, and the answers are mostly in. They are also beside the point, because the film’s conscience does not sit in the chief executive’s office.
It sits with the engineer who carried the company’s own research out the door. Mikey Madison, the Anora star, plays Frances Haugen, and she is the one place where the reviews stop agreeing with each other. They do not simply grade her performance. They read the same choice, a quiet whistleblower who still believes in the place she is exposing, in opposite directions.
The detail that keeps surfacing in the reviews is motive. SlashFilm’s Chris Evangelista describes a Haugen who believes Facebook can be a force for good in the world even as she watches what it does to people. Manuel São Bento, in a first reaction collected by Yahoo, calls Madison “excellent as a whistleblower driven by love, not spite.” Riot’s Julian Lytle, who otherwise gives the film a D, says she plays the data scientist as “a person struggling with the reality of where she works versus the ideal of what that place says it’s going for.”
That is a deliberate design, and it explains a great deal about the temperature of the whole film. The Social Network, as most of us...
THE BILLING GRID A weekly column on research billing and coverage analysis, by Krishma Shah A coordinator submits a lab requisition. The central lab bills it to the site. The site bills it to Medi...