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Friday, November 14, 2003
Stephen Glass story is a shrewd, riveting condemnation of print media
Stephen Glass is a young, former staff writer for "The New Republic" who fell hard from grace in 1998 when an online competitor disclosed that just about every article he wrote over a period of years had been partially or totally faked.
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Since his only punishment for this high crime was a six-figure book deal, and since he stands to profit in some way large or small from the film version of his story, it's hard for a critic to go into this movie without a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas.
Yet I am forced to admit that "Shattered Glass" is the sharpest journalism thriller I've seen in years: an absolutely riveting drama that doesn't glorify its subject in the slightest and shrewdly says a lot of very sad things about the state of modern journalism.
Right off, the smartest thing the film does is not take its scoundrel-hero's point of view. Except for a brief moment in his head at the opening and a flashback sequence in which he addresses a high school class, Glass (Hayden Christensen) remains a boyishly ambitious and incorrigibly whiny but very distant figure.
Most of the story is experienced from the perspective of his editor (Peter Sarsgaard), a plodding, uncharismatic and generally unpopular old-school journalist who learns only in stages that his flashy star reporter is an out-of-control, demented liar.
The film works best if you don't know its story in advance, because it builds off the editor's slow-building comprehension of the extent of the crime, and the real Glass (at least as seen on "60 Minutes") is not nearly as charming as the movie portrays him.
Through the first two acts, the movie seems a fuzzy morality tale, because Glass is so obviously a nut case. He's not just a journalist who makes up a quote here or there. He's a relentless liar, like an alcoholic on an epic binge.
But the script gradually makes it clear that Glass (like The New York Times' Jayson Blair) is the result of the imperiled profession's post-Watergate vanity and its current obsession with youth, political correctness and colorful writing above all other considerations.
First-time writer-director Billy Ray shows us that, for all their pretensions of self-regulation and endless fact-checking, the smug dowagers of print media operate on a blind trust that they probably never deserved, and it's pertinent to the story that this fact was uncovered by an upstart Internet magazine.
"Shattered Glass" makes its case so effectively that it may find a place in movie history as a companion piece to "All the President's Men" -- a kind of tombstone to the headiest era of American journalism that that film kicked off almost 30 years ago.
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