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Sklar reviews Shattered Glass starring Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard and directed by Billy Ray.

Shattered Glass

Produced by Craig Baumgarten, Adam Merims, Gaye Hirsch and Tove Christensen; written and directed by Billy Ray; cinematography by Mandy Walker; edited by Jeffrey Ford; production design by Francois Seguin; costume design by Renee April; music by Mychael Danna; starring Hayden Christensen, Peter Sarsgaard, Hank Azaria, Chloe Sevigny, Melanie Lynskey, Steve Zahn, Rosario Dawson, Cas Anvar. Color, 103 mins. Distributed by Lions Gate Films, 4553 Glencoe Avenue #200, Marina Del Rey, CA 90292, phone (310) 314-2000.

The filmmakcrs of Shuttered Class, no less than nearly all others who have commented on the Stephen Glass scandal, seem haunted by the legend of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. As viewers of all the President's Men will recall, those two young Washington Posl metropolitan reporters took on the President of the United States, exposed Richard Nixon's lies about the Watergate break-in, and accomplished no less (so that film would have us believe) than the salvation of the Republic. Their saga hovers over Shattered Glass as a shining example, a challenge, and also something of a mocking irony for the screen retelling of how, a quarter century later, rival reporters exposed the lies of a maga/inc journalist and helped to rescue not the Republic, but The New Republic. It's as if no one can look at the Stephen Glass affair without unconsciously invoking the old Marxian truism that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Glass's story unfolds in the film during 1998 as the admired young writer for the venerable Washington political weekly tumbles into ignominy as a serial fabricator of his news reports. Once the first breach in his credibility is established, despite Glass's extraordinary efforts at concealment, a final tally reveals that twenty-seven of the forty-one articles he wrote for the magazine were based on invented facts and falsehood. This gross breach of journalistic ethics that Shattered Glass dramatizes has been made even more pertinent by the uncanny replication of its main features in the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times. Why would the mythical heroics of Woodward and Bernstein be mentioned time and again with reference to such egrcgiously dishonorable conduct? Most obviously, because their Watergate reporting serves as a lodestar for an anxious and drastically altered profession in which sensationalism and coarsened standards of accuracy increasingly hold sway. More troublingly, their improbable triumph over a President set the bar so high for journalistic glory that it may encourage ambitious epigone to exaggerate and invent, and in extreme cases such as Glass's, to concoct elaborate lies.

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Written and directed as a first feature by Hollywood screenwriter Billy Ray, Sharferer C/ass straddles or perhaps melds competing interpretations of Glass's behavior, as an aberration from journalistic standards or as a symptom of their decline. The most difficult question about the writer's massive dcviousness concerns whether its motivation lies in personal pathology, or in business as usual carried a step or two over the line. Ray doesn't supply an answer-neither has anyone else-but Hayden Christcnsen's performance as the personable prevaricator offers a rich source of speculation for the film's spectators. At first glance a bespectacled, earnest innocent, Christcnsen's (!lass immediately displays an apparently ingenuous j(?yoir/a;re, beguiling the magazine's receptionist with compliments as he arrives for work. His charm resembles Mickey Rooncy's more than Gary Grant's, yet its naive precocity manages to win over both older male bosses and young female coworkers. he recounts to a latter pair, Gaitlin (Chloe Sevigny) and Amy (Melanie Lynskey), the denouement of a dinner with a male Washington Post reporter who makes a pass at him on the mistaken notion that he, Glass, is gay. The story warns spectators away from identifying Glass's social manner with any particular sexual orientation, even while playing with the possibility that anyone so sensitive and comfortable around women can't be entirely heterosexual. Meanwhile, the anecdote stokes the women's envy of Glass's knack for media networking (as do frequent messages that other magazines are trying to contact him).

At the same time, harboring his guilty secrets, Glass seems pretematurally poised to ward off potential danger. "Are you mad at me?" is a question he repeatedly asks his superiors, testing the temperature of their potential suspicions. On the contrary, they seem captivated by his insouciance. Staff meetings where writers 'pitch' what they're working on invariably turn into Glass's show, and his flamboyant storytelling leaves the likes of Caitlin and Amy, with their earnest pieces on subjects like Kthanol, both entertained and frustrated. Obsequious, manipulative, and strangely insecure, Glass's simultaneously meek but convivial personality dominates the film and turns the other main characters into satellite figures orbiting his rise and fall.

Were Glass's deceptions abetted by complacency, inattention, or favoritism among his editors, which were among the charges leveled at Times news managers in the Blair case? On this subject Shattered Glass treads a delicate line. The New Republic's editor editor during most of Glass's transgressions was Michael Kelly, whose death while covering the Iraq war in 2003 obviated any criticism the filmmakers might have been inclined to make of him. Played by Hank Azaria, Kelly's sole flaw in the film is a paternal permissiveness toward his young writers, a willingness to stand behind them unequivocally when their writing comes under attack. Glass has a free hand under Kelly's benevolence, but the magazine's owner, Marty Peretz (Ted Kotcheff) has soured on his editor. "The tone of the magazine...it's gotten too nasty; it's strayed from the traditions that made it great," Peretz tells writer Chuck Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), informing Lane that he's firing Kelly and offering him Kelly's job.

Viewers aren't offered any context to make sense of this, nor, for that matter, much of an idea about the magazine's traditions, its putative greatness, or its present status. The film portrays the staff as proud of the weekly's political influence through its advertising tagline, "The in-flight magazine of Air Force One." Think about that for a minute. In-flight magazines are promotional tools for airlines; ergo, TVie Wew Repubuc in 1998 was a promotional tool for the man who flew around in Air Force One, a President facing a damaging sex scandal and impending impeachment. While the film leaves Peretz's criticism of Kelly unexplained, its publicity materials pointedly suggest that Peretz acted because Kelly had been writing increasingly sharp criticism of Bill Clinton.

Glass's downfall begins when he concocts a wild piece about a computer hackers' convention, "Hack Heaven," that catches the eye of an editor at Forbes Digital Tool, an online magazine covering new communication technologies. Stung at being scooped, the Tories folk try to track down Glass's sources, and come up cold. These scenes are the film's boldest stab at social commentary. The Forbes staffers mock Tbe New Republic for its snobbery and inflated "in-flight magazine of Air Force One" claim. Visually, Forbes's open-spaced, low-lighted Lower Manhattan loft newsroom contrasts with TNR's cubicled, fluorescent-bright, turquoise-painted bureaucratic Washington offices. While reporter Adam Penenberg (Steve Zahn) handles the inquiry, two non-Caucasian Forbes journalists, editor Kambiz Faroohar (Cas Anvar) and reporter Andie Fox (Rosario Dawson), contrast with The New Republic's all-white staff.

Challenged by Forbes's accusation that Glass's piece is phony, the newly appointed Lane confronts his writer and asks for proof. Docudrama becomes melodrama as-apparently closely following actual events-Glass responds with truculence and self-pity, while at the same time attempting to construct an intricate web of new falsehoods, through fake voice-mail recordings, business cards, and e-mail messages, to buttress the original lies. Glass enlists support from other Kelly loyalists who contrast Lane's skepticism with the former editor's nostalgically remembered fatherly support. Smffifrcf/ Giai: tries to inflate Lane into a journalistic hero in the Woodward-Bernstein mold as he overcomes staff enmity and Glass's strategic petulance to arrive at vital truth. (Shown worrying over these matters alongside his wife and infant child, Lane is the only character in the film privileged with a private life away from work.)

The film's narrative structure, however, undercuts its claims for Lane and for its own commitment to unvarnished factuality. In order to create a natural setting for a Glass voice-over that runs throughout the film and add significant factual information, the filmmakcrs send Glass back to speak at his high school's journalism class, inter-cutting scenes of his speech with events unfolding at the magazine. The high school setting adds a slightly grotesque touch that tends to undermine the film's loftier purpose, as Glass is inordinately fawned over by his former journalism teacher (called here Mrs. Duke, but the character is not listed in the cast credits) and gazed at lasciviously by coeds in the class. The speech does serve to answer one crucial question: How could Glass get away with it? he tells the students that the magazine's fact-checking system, while ostensibly a "torture test," has a big hole in it-a willingness to accept information 'per author.'

Like most docudramas, Sbaffemi Glass is better at action than introspection. It gives a rich sense of Glass's outward behavior but little about his intentions, or, for that matter, how he managed to justify himself. It offers only a shadowy picture of The New Republic, and seems to be grounded on the mustiest of cliches about journalism, which the Rim's press notes describe as "our culture's noblest profession" that "protects our most precious freedoms." If only. Maybe Woodward and Bernstein deserved such exalted rhetoric, but Steven Glass's transgressions, based on the film's shallow efforts at insight, might be better suited for a Broadway musical.-Robert Sklar.