Shattered Glass | Film Review

FILM MOVIE REVIEW

Shattered Glass ***

by Ed Gonzalez on November 20, 2003 Jump to Comments (0) or Add Your Own

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There's a bogus sort of genius to Billy Ray's Shattered Glass, which recounts the events surrounding Forbes online journalists busting Stephen Glass for cooking up stories for The New Republic. The worst that can be said about the film is that it doesn't concern itself with the nature-or-nurture anatomy of Glass's crimes. Then again, can you imagine having to suffer through scenes showing a young Glass living out Oedipal melodramas that would lazily explain his snarky, passive aggressive personality? As played by a remarkable Hayden Christensen, Glass kills his coworkers with thoughtfulness, an elaborate emotional con-job that not only speaks volumes about his guilt but also evokes the way he sculpts reality. Just as there's no pretext to this madness, Ray doesn't explain how fact checkers at New Republic allowed one piece after another to fall through the cracks during Glass's late-'90s stint at the magazine. That's because Ray tells the entire film from the perspective of Glass's friends and fellow journalists, who may as well be the doting parents children are continuously trying to impress and afraid of disappointing. Because the audience never sees how the young man turned into a fabulist or how he pulled the wool over everyone's eyes, Shattered Glass needs to be approached as an elaborate emotional set piece. Journalists who've ever feared handing in a story on time or scrounged desperately for a good idea will probably relate to the film more than others, but that's to trivialize its universal appeal. For all its flaws (the ridiculous empty-class metaphor, the schoolhouse sequences that substitute for voiceovers, and the self-congratulatory, heartwarming bookends), this is a film that frighteningly speaks to our lingering juvenile fears. Christensen is a revelation. He nails both that cloying puppy-dog expression Glass uses to seduce the world around him and that moment of mental retardation that kicks in when you've been caught in a lie and your Id struggles desperately to take over. Because watching the actor squirm under pressure is as frightening as it is entertaining, Shattered Glass speaks simultaneously to our humanity and sense of moral outrage.

Director(s): Billy Ray
Screenplay: Billy Ray
Cast: Hayden Christensen, Peter Sarsgaard, Chloe Sevigny, Melanie Lynskey, Steve Zahn, Hank Azaria, Rosario Dawson
Distributor: Lions Gate Films
Runtime: 94 min.
Rating: PG-13
Year: 2003