I managed to make time yesterday to get out to see another movie. This time it was Shattered Glass, a film about a young writer for The New Republic named Stephen Glass (well played by Hayden Christensen), and his unraveling when his latest piece in the magazine is called into question. The intoxicating element is that it's all true. The movie does an excellent job retaining as much of the real pieces as possible, including the false home page of Jukt Micronics, a company Glass fabricated for the article Hack Heaven. Hack Heaven was turned out to be the undoing of Glass when Adam Penenberg (played by Steve Zahn) at Forbes.com started looking more closely at the piece after his editor showed it to him, asking, "why didn't you get this piece?"
The responsibility for dealing with the storm that's about to be unleashed falls on new editor Chuck Lane (played by Peter Sarsgaard). At this time, Lane is not liked by the writers in the office, and is viewed as an editor with a grudge against the writers who were loyal to the previous editor, Mike Kelly (played by Hank Azaria). Kelly is viewed as a "writer's editor," someone who always backs his writers (the real Kelly ultimately went on to become editor at The Atlantic Montly, and died this past April on assignment in Iraq). Near the halfway mark, the movie does a subtle shift of focus from Glass to Lane. Lane is trying to find as many hard facts as possible so that when the Forbes piece is published, The New Republic can still stand strong. At this point, it is assumed (because Glass keeps insisting that he was at these places, and did nothing wrong) that Glass was duped into the story by a group of clever hackers. At this point also, the movie shifts from being merely an interesting office politics story and develops into a bit of a thriller. Glass becomes increasingly creepy as the movie goes on (even before it turns into a thriller), stemming from a statement he makes in the opening moments of the film about playing the role of modesty in the midst of more audacious writers. He shrugs off calls from other magazines (Harper's, Policy Review) when asked "are you talking to Harper's?" with "No, it's probably nothing." Whenever he's asked by his editor (either one) to come into their office, Glass's initial reaction is a (slightly loud) "are you mad at me?"
The film does a good job of portraying this story as the story itself, and doesn't treat it as a sign-of-the-times piece where the more literary magazines are under pressure for flashier stories and content. The issue comes up, naturally, a few times in the film, but it's more background noise than anything else. The movie is punctuated throughout with Glass speaking to a journalism class at his old high school, and we get some insight into how he could get away with what he did from a couple of statements he makes to the class (namely in a bit about how to get around fact checking), but doesn't dwell on Glass's history to try to find out why he printed so many lies. Most of that comes off in Christensen's performance itself, and the audience is trusted to put together the why and even a bit of the how.
Overall, another good movie with solid performances and subtle filming. This and The Secret Lives of Dentists has really got me enjoying the movies again - going to the older theaterplex that is now all indie/art house movies, eating popcorn or Pizza, and getting lost in these stories. The new stadium theaters are nice, but having smaller theaters for smaller stories is so much more fitting. I'm still amazed at how this town has gone from one dedicated screen just 2-3 years ago to having 11.