Wonder boy

Noel Vera

Billy Ray's "Shattered Glass" tells the true story of Stephen Glass
(Hayden Christensen), the hot New Republic writer who did
provocative, highly entertaining articles for the magazine (one,
about a hacker so successful he got his own agent and managed to hire
himself out to one of the same corporations he used to hack; another
about young Republicans partying wildly in a Washington hotel). The
hacker piece turns out to be Glass' undoing, as Adam Penenberg
(Stephen Zahn) of the webzine Forbes Digital Tools tries to follow up
on the story, and learns that neither hacker nor agent nor hacker's
website--not even the company that ultimately hired the hacker--ever
existed.

Penenberg smells a different story by now, but he would probably not
have gotten far, or the story would have been more difficult to root
out, if Glass had the support of his old editor, the late Michael
Kelly (Hank Azaria), who had shepherded Glass to his current stardom.
But Kelly had given way to Charles Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), a rather
muted cold fish who the magazine's staffers tend to compare
(unfavorably, at that) to the more popular Kelly, and it's Lane who
finally asks the crucial question: could Glass be lying?

As Christensen plays him, Glass is a charming, moist-eyed wunderkind,
a hotshot young writer who can't do any wrong, who at the same time
manages to be well-liked because he acts as if he can't believe he's
getting all the glory, or attention. The disbelief is part of the
performance, of course, and Christensen seems to be drawing on the
narcissistic need of actors to be on center stage, as well as on a
beautiful young man's lifelong assumption that people will like him
for his looks, right off; the rest is charm and social skills. Later,
as the web of suspicion tightens around Glass, his fabrications start
to contradict themselves and his face takes on a strained, sweaty
desperation; his most potent weapon against skepticism is a plaintive
lost-boy plea for sympathy: "Are you mad at me?" he asks, more than
once. Glass' distress works well enough to arouse the maternal
instincts of at least two of the staff, Caitlin Avey (Chloe Sevigny)
and Amy Brand (Melanie Lynskey), who defend him against Lane; it also
suggests the gigantic sense of insecurity you might find howling away
inside people who trade on appearances--models, actors, con men,
celebrities of one kind or another. They may be charming and fun to
be with when they wish to be, but when things go wrong there is in
intensity to their neediness that seems almost psychotic. Christensen
seems to be trading on his looks during the first half (which is
probably the point), but the neurotic anxiety he brings out in the
second is reasonably persuasive evidence of the acting skills he
never got to show, playing a Jedi Romeo in George Lucas' movies (it's
not Christensen's fault; Lucas lost interest in using human beings as
human beings years ago).

But the film ultimately isn't about the eponymous Glass and his
eventual undoing; it isn't even about truth or the lack of it in
magazine journalism. Instead it's about Sarsgaard's cold-fish Charles
Lane, and the triumph of unpopular doggedness over a popular
deception--of boring, old-fashioned logic over the cult of
personality. Sarsgaard's low-key intensity is perfectly matched
against Christensen's high-profile charm; the brightness of one
brings out the other's dark outlines in sharper relief. This is what
director Ray was leading up to all along, the exchange of one
dichotomy (integrity vs. entertainment) for another (determination
vs. charisma). That the real Charles Lane is, in fact, one of the
consultants paid to help make this film actually reinforces Ray's
point, possibly in ways even he never intended: why be some pretty-
boy actor performing in front of the camera when you could be one of
the figures behind the camera, quietly pulling the strings?

"Shattered Glass" does have its flaws. Ray, a first-time director,
doesn't bring the kind of visual excitement to the big screen that an
old hand like Alan J. Pakula did to his newspaper thriller, "All the
President's Men" (it helped that Pakula had cinematographer Gordon
Willis realize his dark shadows and harsh neon glares for him). The
film doesn't give us much insight into Glass, focusing instead on the
outer details of his exposure. The film also takes (probably thanks
to Lane) the New Republic's reputation too seriously--more than once
we hear it called "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One" (which
may be true, but not necessarily a good thing). And while the
articles are not quite puff pieces, and their wholesale fabrication
unforgivable, the film doesn't deal with the larger question of more
serious forms of deceit (articles subtly skewed, with full editorial
consent, to present a particular point of view; selective coverage of
topics either deemed too uninteresting, or detrimental to the
interest of the paper or magazine's corporate backers).

Ray succeeds despite everything in coming up with a reasonably
entertaining, surprisingly compelling, superbly acted (almost
everyone--from Zahn to Sevigny to Lynsky to, above all, Sarsgaard--is
good) drama, and perhaps one of the reasons why it's so compelling is
because it conforms so readily to our notions about journalists today-
-that fabricators like Glass (and his more recent counterpart, Jayson
Blair, who did similar harm to the New York Times) are the most
serious problems they and their editors face. It's well-made, and
tells enough of the truth that you're moved and disturbed by what
happened; if it fails to be a great film about newspaper ethics, that
may be because it doesn't tell the whole truth about what happened.

(First published in Businessworld, 5/6/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)