Review: Shattered Glass

Shattered Glass speaks simultaneously to our humanity and sense of moral outrage.

Shattered Glass
Photo: Lions Gate Films

There’s a bogus sort of genius to writer-director 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, say, 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 co-workers 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 The 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.

And 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 unfolds 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 appeal. For all its flaws (that empty class that’s ridiculously deployed as a metaphor, the schoolhouse sequences that obviously substitute for voiceovers, and the self-congratulatory, heartwarming bookends), this is a film that frighteningly speaks to our lingering juvenile fears.

Advertisement

As Glass, Christensen is a revelation. He nails both that cloying puppy-dog expressiveness that Glass uses to seduce the world around him and that moment of mental incapacitation 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.

Score: 
 Cast: Hayden Christensen, Peter Sarsgaard, Chloë Sevigny, Melanie Lynskey, Steve Zahn, Hank Azaria, Rosario Dawson  Director: Billy Ray  Screenwriter: Billy Ray  Distributor: Lions Gate Films  Running Time: 94 min  Rating: PG-13  Year: 2003  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.