DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Stephen Glass was a star journalist in the late 1990s, until the news broke that he’d fabricated all or part of about half his high-profile articles.

A movie about writing magazine articles would be pretty drab. Fortunately, Shattered Glass is really about the main character’s obsessive need to be accepted, praised, the center of attention. Playing the lead role, Hayden Christensen demonstrates something not at all apparent from his better-known role — namely, that he can act. His performance is a master class in manipulation.

The best part of the DVD release is the 60 Minutes interview with the real Stephen Glass, filmed about five years after his unceremonious retirement from The National Review. Glass had apparently spent a couple years in therapy, and a couple more in law school, which in some circles could be considered an appropriate punishment for, well, just about anything. Curiously, the state BAR association had held up his law license due to ethics concerns.

What was striking about the interview was how well Christensen had nailed the portrayal. While Glass spoke, expressing remorse for what he had done, I could imagine Christensen delivering the same lines, and I couldn’t help but conclude that Glass was back to his old tricks — after having watched Christensen-as-Glass deliver lie after lie with whole-body sincerity, watching the real Glass say something that is almost certainly true was entirely unbelievable.

In the same interview, an ex-coworker from TNR called Glass a “worm.” That has to hurt.

Then again, Glass reportedly got a six-figure advance for his semi-autobiographical novel about … wait for it … a magazine writer who fakes his stories. Check out the reviews; sadly for Glass’ writing career, it got universally panned at Amazon. (You’d think the one thing he could really do well is write fiction!)

But the movie, and especially Christensen, is great, and at ~$6 the DVD is a steal.

Read more about the movie at IMDB.