Start the Presses

For a while now, Netflix has been telling me that I would probably like this movie from a few years back, Shattered Glass. I'd been ignoring/putting it off for a while, but then recently I read an article praising the top 10 film performances of this recently completed decade. There on the list was Peter Sarsgaard, for his work in this movie. I was just talking about what a great performance I thought he'd given in An Education, so I decided to give the movie a chance.

Shattered Glass is the true story of young journalist Stephen Glass (get it?), who wrote for a prestigious magazine in the late 1990s. When another news organization starts digging into the facts surrounding one of his published articles, it begins to appear that some of the things he wrote about might have been embellished... or even fabricated entirely.

This young journalist is played by Hayden Christensen, and if thoughts of wooden acting immediately fill your head at that name, Star Wars fans, let me reassure you that you won't find any here. Here -- as in Life as a House, he shows that as a director, George Lucas can make anyone look bad. (Assuming you didn't already know that from Natalie Portman, Ewan McGregor, and Liam Neeson, among others.) He's not giving a riveting performance, but it is a credible one, as you watch a young man's carefully constructed work life begin to crumble around him.

Peter Sarsgaard plays the editor of the magazine, who must dig deeper into Glass' entire career at the magazine. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what about this performance prompted anyone to rank it as one of the decade's 10 best. It's not a flashy role by any stretch of the imagination. Still, he does a good job with it. In any other movie like this, his character would likely be the protagonist of the tale; here he's almost an antagonist to Glass' slightly heroic character, but he walks the line in a careful enough way to balance the story. Ultimately, there's no one to "root for" or to outright hate in this movie, and that's as it should be.

Some other people you'll likely recognize show up in the film, though all of them are in smaller parts: Chloë Sevigny, Rosario Dawson, Hank Azaria, and Steve Zahn. The story really boils down to a clash between Christensen and Sarsgaard's characters, so the rest of them mainly just serve to shepherd the plot along.

Ultimately, the movie is fairly entertaining, but also fairly predictable. It's also more of an intellectual ride than an emotional ride. As I mentioned, there's not really anyone to root for in a tale like this, so there's also not any person or people to get caught up with. Still, most movies based on real life events -- particularly movies made so soon after the events they chronicle -- rarely have this much entertainment value. I guess Netflix was right; I did mostly like this movie. I rate it a B-.