Shattered Glass

Watching “Shattered Glass” makes me reconsider the importance I gave to all of my heated discussions in the newsroom. Here is a movie that treats human interest story telling with starry-eyed fascination and yet is so sympathetic and tepid without ever boiling down to the real story at stake.

The story of Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) is well known by me and any of my peers who have taken a journalistic ethics course in the last 10 years. Glass was a young reporter for The New Republic, a Washington D.C. based political mag with a distribution that included Air Force One, who in 1998 was found to have either partially or fully fabricated more than half of the 40 magazine features he wrote. He had for some time duped his editors by showing only his hand-written notes as evidence for fact checking. But when a small online tech magazine stumbled across a story he did on a hacker infiltrating a major software company, it was revealed that the company, the people, the locations and all the details had been complete fiction. To cover his tracks, he created phony business cards and websites and even had his brother pose as a source.

Glass’s story is more interesting than the movie is. Not only has “Shattered Glass” managed to horribly date itself in less than a decade, it goes about portraying Glass all wrong.

As a sort of conspiracy drama, the details of Glass’s mystery are plain laughable. Today, anyone with an Internet connection and half a brain could figure out that Glass was totally full of it. The media moves so quickly today that suspicions over as many red flags and missing links as the small tech magazine dig up on Glass would be called out online instantly. Somehow, watching Adam Penenberg (Steve Zahn) do research on “all of the search engines” (remember Dogpile anyone?) doesn’t seem like hard-nosed journalism.

What’s more, the website Glass creates and the business card he forges are so fake that anyone would notice immediately that all of this is sketchy. You wonder then why everyone in the movie doesn’t just call this guy out on his bullshit sooner.

But something seems even more phony about Glass. Hayden Christensen cannot act his way out of a plastic bag, and he plays Glass as a nerdy, idealistic and childish dope. The movie constantly has to reassure us that he’s just a humble, fragile figure, and his innocent puppy dog act gets old real fast. It becomes so maudlin just trying to make us feel a little sympathy for the poor plagiarist when it should be digging into what really made Glass tick.

Is this guy a criminal mastermind with a sinister side or someone who is psychologically perverse? He spouts cookie cutter messages of journalistic integrity to a class of young journalists but is either so manipulative or really has no clue what it is he’s doing wrong. The movie would rather create one-dimensional newsroom drama than ask these questions, with The New Republic reporters claiming that the new editor, Chuck Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), is just biased to anyone who is still faithful to the previous editor, Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria).

“Shattered Glass” is a dumb movie that a better or more experienced director than Billy Ray could’ve made into something smart and poignant. He would’ve done the same job of a good news editor. And saying that, I promise that nothing I’ve written about “Shattered Glass” is fabricated in any way. I really did watch this piece of junk.

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