It’s been a godawful month for Aaron Sorkin.
The guy’s facing more crises than the Bartlet administration.
First came the 65-year-old writer-director’s sorry sequel to “The Social Network,” the thuddingly titled “The Social Reckoning.”
About a whistleblower exposing wrongdoing by Facebook in 2021, it was a bona fide Coke 2. Nobody wanted it. Nobody.
“The Social Network,” the gripping 2010 underdog story starring a superb Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg, is one of the best films of the past 25 years. Didactic and overwritten “Reckoning” is closer to an 8 a.m. lecture at Sorkin University. And most of the class slept in.
The movie holds a 55% on RottenTomatoes (even that’s too generous) and it has grossed only $16.9 million globally off a $30 million budget. Sony ripped the film out of 2,000 theaters this weekend, its third in release, so that means bombs away.
Taking over as Zuck, Jeremy Strong was rather less believably human than a Roomba. And Sorkin replaced David Fincher as director, a misguided and destructive swap.
So, what of the Oscars in March? Might I suggest a trip to a faraway private island with no TVs instead?
And while you’re there, also book a room for June’s Tony Awards.
Because this week on Broadway, a rough revival of Sorkin’s “A Few Good Men” opened at Lincoln Center. That military courtroom drama, which first played New York back in 1989, is what established the writer as an emerging force. “You can’t handle the truth!,” et cetera, et cetera.
Sorkin took off from there. Rob Reiner’s 1992 film adaptation starring Tom Cruise, Demi Moore and Jack Nicholson was a Best Picture Oscar nominee. “The American President” arrived in 1995 and his TV opus “The West Wing” came to NBC four years after that.
But the reviews of the Lincoln Center show weren’t so hot on Thursday night. A few miffed critics knocked the script — yours truly in The Post, Charles Isherwood in the Wall Street Journal and Alexis Soloski in The Times.
That surprised me. I figured that if there’s any safe space for Sorkin, it’s the Upper West Side. Not so much, apparently.
We’ve reached the Sorkin Reckoning.
What’s happened?
Well, it must first be acknowledged that “Reckoning” is qualitatively Sorkin’s worst piece of writing in a very long time.
He’s known — or was known — for his dialogue’s breakneck speed and wit. Yet suddenly in this terrible movie, he’s banging out fee-fi-fo-fum exchanges like this one.
When WSJ writer Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White, tells Facebook employee Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were not actually political reporters, but metro reporters, she mystifyingly responds, “They use mousse?”.
Sorkin himself might make a groaner metrosexual crack at a party and get a kick out of it, but a young woman in tech in 2020s California? No way. And frankly the joke is stupid no matter who says it.
The man has also lost his muscularity. Just as his once crackling way with words has been snuffed out, so too has the writer’s ability to make us feel anything. Especially in political or politically adjacent stories such as “Reckoning,” Sorkin used to be a pro at manipulating our hearts into beating faster.
Think Martin Sheen’s fanciful President Bartlet reciting some poem while orchestral music swells, Josh Lyman eloquently dressing down a mean old lobbyist or Eisenberg’s Zuck during his deposition snapping, “You have part of my attention. You have the minimum amount.”
Chills.
Now America’s only name-brand screenwriter has become a cold essayist — a David Mamet of the left whose unrealistic and unappealing automaton characters spout off clinical information while sounding just like him. Cranky. “Reckoning” is a chore to watch.
But “A Few Good Men” isn’t new. The play has been around for 37 years. Why isn’t it resonating anymore?
I’m convinced the appetite for Sorkin’s schtick has dried up. Across the political spectrum, the public no longer romanticizes elected officials, or colonels, or newsrooms or tech geniuses.
They don’t believe those people speak in Wildean repartee behind closed doors, nor do they necessarily want them to. Heck, even the famous “West Wing” walk-and-talk is dead. Most of us from the White House on down are chained to our desks and chat with colleagues on messaging platforms.
His style is as retro as the Macarena.
Still, every so often Sorkin or a member of the “West Wing” cast will tease a possible reboot, as if that could ever work.
But it seems clear to me after these October surprises that the Sorkin administration has finally reached its term limit.
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