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By PAUL BRENNER
Screenwriter Billy Ray's
directorial debut, "Shattered Glass," now
available on DVD through Lions Gate Home
Entertainment, is a small, no-frills film on
journalistic integrity in an era boasting such
phony journalists as Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley.
But in George W. Bush's culture of leniency, where
everything slides (even U.S. brutalities in Iraq),
"Shattered Glass" takes on a layered subtext and
it becomes the perfect film time capsule for the
times.
Ray offers a straightforward (shall I say it)
reportorial dramatization of the state of the art
of investigative journalism in contemporary
America, where no news is THE news (as Mort Sahl
has remarked, "The last piece of news I heard was
five years ago when Tom Brokaw declared that the
World War II generation was The Greatest
Generation"). The antithesis of "All the
President's Men," Ray tells the tale of Stephen
Glass (Hayden Christensen), a staff writer for The
New Republic, who, by the mid-90s, was one of the
most sought after journalists in Washington,
making over $100,000 a year writing for The New
Republic along with Rolling Stone, Harper's, and
George. But when editor Michael Kelly (Hank
Azaria) leaves The New Republic and a new editor,
Chuck Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), takes over, Lane
begins to notice problems with one of Glass's
stories. Ultimately, Lane finds that Glass's hot
new article on hackers is completely fabricated.
And before the smoke clears, Lane discovers that
twenty-seven of Glass's forty-one articles for the
magazine were all made up.
Glass smugly advices a high school journalism
student as one point, "You don't want to hear the
whole journalistic responsibility speech, do you?
You just want to get your name in print, right?"
It is this instant gratification (achieving your
goal without going through the process) that Ray
ably conveys in "Shattered Glass." Christensen's
Glass is an innocent, spoiled boy who begs for
sympathy and attention and Ray utilizes this
characterization along with a succession of
unreliable flashbacks to feed into audience
identification with the Glass character. The
viewer is taken in, much as were the staff of The
New Republic.
As Ray emphasizes, facts in world of The New
Republic and the world at large no longer matter.
Glass convinces the staff of the validity of his
stories, not through proof and reasoning, but by
charm and performance. The staff is regaled by
Glass gyrating on a chair as he pitches his
articles like a starving screenwriter to a studio
boss. In "Shattered Glass," journalism has become
like everything else in Bush's America: it is not
facts or artistic talent that matters. Rather, it
the assertion, the style, that counts. Success is
merely performance and nothing else.
The Stephen Glass of "Shattered Glass" has no
future, has no past. He is a cipher. But he is,
ultimately, a representative cipher for us all.
Special Features of the DVD include audio
commentary with Billy Ray and The New Republic
editor Chuck Lane and a "60 Minutes II" interview
with the real Stephen Glass. The video is in 5.1
Dolby Digital and is subtitled in English and
Spanish. |
