Director: Aaron Sorkin
Cast: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Wunmi Mosaku, Jeremy Strong
Have I Seen It Before: Well, that’s the funny thing about a piece of Sorkin. Youtube is literally littered with super cuts of disparate Sorkin characters saying the same thing over and over again. The problem is probably a mix of him having almost single-handedly written five seasons of television straight*, and may have a finite amount of things to say, but there’s at least a bit of an argument that getting sober might have saved his life, but dulled the edge of his writing. Nevertheless, by my casual count we at least got the “I prefer credentials” speech, but it almost seems like, given the subject matter, there was no way around hitting that chestnut again.
Did I Like It: The simple criticism of this film is that Sorkin is not anywhere in the same league of a director as David Fincher. <The Social Network (2010)> contained some of Sorkin’s best writing, but moved it along with nimbly alternating senses of sadness and energy. Here, I wonder if Sorkin might have been happier making this a stage play. Sorkin never once directed an episode of any of his television shows, when he certainly could have exercised that ambition then, if he wanted to. Contemporaries like Matthew Weiner or (no judgments; we can have that conversation later) Joss Whedon were directing with frequency in preparation of riches yet to come. I honestly wonder if Sorkin was peer-pressured into directing, and there’s been very little about Sorkin’s work since Molly’s Game (2017) that has made me feel otherwise.
Not to load this up with everything I think is wrong with the film, but there’s a structural problem here that I find more than a little surprising. Appropriately, there’s a few references to <All the President’s Men (1976)> here, but we didn’t read or see that story in a popular format until after Nixon had resigned. Here, Sorkin swings for a neo-Capra ending, but we’re still sitting here in an era where misinformation rages (arguably even more so) and Facebook is content to ruin our lives with impunity. It’s almost as if we’re treated to the version of All the President’s Men that was written in the Watchmen universe, where the story ends not with Nixon out of the way, but with Woodward and Bernstein in a ditch somewhere.
*From the first season of Sports Night straight through to the fourth-season finale of The West Wing, and the first season of The West Wing and the second season of Sports Night overlapped. I know from where I speak.