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Shattered
Glass
 Shattered Glass is the true story
of a rising young journalist who gets on with the New Republic magazine
and finds it easier to fabricate stories on popular culture than to
actually get out and dig them up legitimately. Stephen Glass (at
right),
portrayed with sort of lip quivering pathetic effectiveness by Hayden
Christensen comes to realize early in his journalism career something
that most of us here at the Goliard already knew which is that writing
can be much more fun if you don't have to be accurate, truthful, and
accountable. The difference that caused the problem in his case of course was
that he chose to write for the snooty Republic and we choose to work
here. What makes his story more interesting however is that he got away with it
for quite some time and managed to slip almost thirty feature articles
past the crack staff of editors and fact checkers, not to mention
the readers themselves who, it would seem, with a simple google or
two, could have raised enough questions to bring him down. And the fact that he
got away with it by setting up bogus answering machine messages and
constructing decidedly amateur looking web pages to throw off any
cursory investigations into his sources would seem to call to
question the credibility of big time journalism. Actually though, it
seems more to be a classic case of the benefit of the doubt being given to
someone who seemed to have it all and therefore would have no reason
to cheat. Things all fell apart for Glass however when a burgeoning online outfit
finally began sniffing around one of his stories and found that none of the
people mentioned or companies involved in his feature on computer
hacking seemed to exist. Peter
Sarsgaard, Chloë
Sevigny and Hank
Azaria turn in fine supporting roles as Glass's editors and
co-workers that have to come to terms with his dishonesty and Rosario
Dawson (picture does not quite contain nudity unfortunately) is
completely underused in some token minor role.
While the film gives a good glimpse into the inner workings of big
time magazine journalism, the story really boils down to the basic tenets
of the institution and the director, by interplaying Glass speaking
to a apocryphal journalism class about his experiences in the
business throughout the film, nicely juxtaposes the dreams and
realities of becoming successful. And while not in the same league
obviously as something like Absence
of Malice or All
the President's Men, Shattered Glass strives to be that type of
film in that the touchy decisions that face journalists on a daily
basis, as far as the law and ethics inherent in the work are
concerned, are what drive the plot along.
Another interesting aspect to the
story if not the movie is that once all this originally broke,
Stephen Glass was fired of course and then simply dropped out of sight. In the film he was
claiming to be going to Georgetown law school at night to the
consternation of his co-workers and, we at least, figured that this
was just another lie he was telling. Apparently though, he was
actually attending law school perhaps because he alone knew that he might
someday be in dire need of legal advice. In any event, he graduated
apparently and has resurfaced on the national scene recently to
grant interviews and publish a novel entitled The Fabulist (see
the bitter reviews in the National Review and the Wall
Street Journal) which is reportedly about a guy named Stephen Glass who
gets fired for fabricating stories. We have not read the book which
by it's very presence seems to highly annoy legitimate journalists
all over the country, but by all accounts it is not nearly as well
written or interesting as some of the fiction Glass was writing for
the New Republic that got him into the whole mess. A strange tale
indeed and if not a great film, at least a good one and interesting for anyone who
has dabbled in the writing profession at any level and especially
for those of us who struggle with the line between fiction and fact on a
daily basis.
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