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This
week's featured review & film archive
Sarah Jaffe reviews
independent and foreign films,
in addition to reporting the latest buzz behind
Colorado's film festivals.
Shattered Glass (2003, Billy Ray)
You may not have heard of Stephen Glass. Heck,
you may not have heard of The New Republic magazine.
You probably have heard of Jayson Blair, though,
and the stories are very similar. Glass fabricated
over half the articles he wrote for The New Republic,
and writer/director Billy Ray decided that he
had to make the story into a film.
Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker--you know
him) plays Glass, the youngest reporter at The
New Republic in Washington, D.C. Glass is very
charismatic and writes articles that capture people's
attention, including people at Rolling Stone and
George, where he also contributes. He's also great
at interoffice politics, and his coworkers and
editor adore him. The trouble comes in, or at
least seems to, when Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria)
is fired as editor and replaced by Chuck Lane
(Peter Sarsgaard), who is much less popular, and
who doesn't buy into Glass's cult of personality.
It's theoretically a movie about Glass, and he
even narrates it through a framing device that
ultimately is shown to be a sham, like most of
his stories. But it's really Chuck Lane's film.
Glass doesn't change, we don't see much of his
feelings, only what everyone else feels about
him--he's a static character. Lane is the only
character that is more than one-dimensional. Chloe
Sevigny and Melanie Lynskey are almost wasted
as little more than Glass groupies, and even Steve
Zahn as the reporter who finally exposes Glass
gets little screen time. Rosario Dawson pops up
and seems like she'll have a bigger role, but
then fades out.
Christensen is very good as Glass, but you have
to wonder that people didn't see through him sooner
if he was half as obvious as he is in the film.
Sarsgaard is very good as well, and it's unclear
why everyone despises his character. In the end,
the story suffers from a lack of humanity. Everyone
is seen through someone else's eyes, and there's
no one character to identify with.
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