Review

Review Date: 16-November-03
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Shattered Glass (2003)

When I added "Shattered Glass" to my list of upcoming movies, I challenged it to refute my belief that Hayden Christensen is the worst actor ever spawned from the womb of woman. Now that I have seen this fine film from writer/director Billy Ray, I have in fact revised my opinion: no longer convinced that Christensen is a terrible actor, I have no idea what to make of him at all.

My confusion stems from the fact that "Shattered Glass" features Christensen as a young man who acts for a life if not for a living. He portrays Stephen Glass, the 24-year-old reporter fired from The New Republic in 1998 after it was discovered that he fabricated an article about computer hackers in its entirety. (Similar revelations occurred with other pieces after his departure.) In Ray's script, Glass is an inwardly murky but outwardly shiny little boy with an almost pathological need to be liked. (His mantras include "Are you mad at me?" and "I'm sorry.") Working from this model, Christensen creates one of the creepiest people I have ever seen on film, but it's hard to tell whether his ineptitude makes it easy for him to inhabit the skin of a phony, or whether his talent enables him to tap the soul of deeply disturbed (and disturbing) individual.

I get a better handle on Peter Sarsgaard, the actor with the kind, perceptive, Alice in Wonderland face who shows remarkable skill in playing Chuck Lane, the unfortunate editor left to pick up the pieces of Glass' breakage. His performance is already generating Oscar buzz, and no wonder; he modestly but powerfully embodies the movie's almost nostalgic core of truth, honesty, and old fashioned integrity. Despised by Glass and his colleagues for being pedantic, unimaginative, and generally uncool, Lane simply does what he has to do, whether he wants to or not. As with all quiet men who have strong notions of right, when his simmering anger and disappointment finally come to a boil, they give off real heat.

The face-off between Glass and Lane forms the compelling centerpiece of the film, generating more edge-of-your-seat tension than most thrillers. But "Shattered Glass" isn't solely about mood. Glass' downfall contains a message about a critical shift in our society, as reflected in the very profession that aims to capture it. Although The New Republic was founded in 1914 and proudly calls itself "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One," by the 1990s its writers were all in their twenties, bright, enterprising kids who, like others of their generation, cared more about publicity than proper punctuation. Glass succeeds at first because he gives his readers and coworkers what they want --- outlandish, hyper-realistic entertainment --- and when his fabrications begin to show he almost gets away with it by hiding behind his I-may-be-naughty-but-I'm-not-bad persona. Fittingly, the reporters who uncover Glass' deceit work for an on-line publication; the contrast between their modern dot-com-style loft and The New Republic's classic fluorescent-lit office speaks volumes about the changing culture of news and information.

A movie, even one based on real life, has less responsibility to tell the truth than a magazine, so it may be that "Shattered Glass" alters the facts of the story to serve the filmmaker's purpose. The "where are they now?" blurb at the end reveals that Glass recently published a book called "The Fabulist," in which he hints that ambition drove him to commit professional fraud. Is he to be believed? Who knows. But the movie, at least, impressively suggests that his personal compulsion, combined with a societal preference for quick style over slow brewed substance, brought about a distressing and illustrative episode in journalistic history.

Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.