Those of you outside the Beltway may have forgotten, if you ever knew, that Stephen Glass is the whiz-kid writer fired from The New Republic after it was revealed that he made up a story. Actually, he made up about half his anecdotal, audience-pleasing stories (I was snookered; I recall giving the one about wealthy businessmen who, inspired by Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, pay a company to helicopter them into wilderness and drop them with no supplies and no map, to a coworker with whom I’d argued about Into the Wild; I scrawled, “Unbelievable!” across the top, but of course, I didn’t mean it literally). In retrospect, the titles of the fraudulent articles seem almost like a coded confession: The Hall Monitor, Hazardous to Your Mental Health, Rock the Morons, Writing on the Wall, Spring Breakdown, A Fine Mess, After the Fall, The Young and the Feckless, Kicked Out, Anatomy of a Policy Fraud, Ratted Out, Clutch Situation.
Hayden Christensen thankfully proves that his wretched Attack of the Clones performance was George Lucas’s fault more than his own; he does a great job creating Glass as an ingratiating, pathologically approval-seeking kid for whom you can’t help feeling sorry (at least, I couldn’t) even as you shake your head in disbelief at his utter lack of an ethical compass. Countering him is Peter Sarsgaard as TNR editor Chuck Lane, who discovers Glass’s fraud and who is as unpopular (unfairly) in the office as Glass is beloved. He’s terrific, too, and the climactic scene between them is wrenching because you feel for both of them. Perhaps I’m more sympathetic to Glass than others would be, my imminent heartbreak having become actual and my sensitivity to rejection thus even more acute. I experienced something like what I felt about Tom Ripley: I would never go as far as he did to win love and acceptance, but I certainly understand the underlying emotional impetus. Where the rest of the audience laughed at Lane’s icy dismissal of Glass’s pathetic pleas for help – “It makes a nice story” – I felt a pang. Few movies can put two characters in opposition and make you sympathetic to both (incidentally, I made this comment in an online chat with the film’s writer-director, Billy Ray [when did he drop “Cyrus” from his name?], and he asked that I repeat it to 100 of my closest friends. Can do!).
The other performances, from a cast familiar to anyone who’s seen the last five or ten years of indie cinema, are excellent as well. Steve Zahn, as the reporter for an online magazine who first susses out Glass’s inventions, makes a smooth transition from his typically manic hilarity to a dry, witty hilarity. Hank Azaria, playing former TNR editor Michael Kelly, is good in the sense of skilled, but also in the sense of faultless -- one wonders if his portrayal would have been quite so hagiographic had he not recently been killed in Iraq.
It’s fun reading the stories in Slate, Salon, and similar politically oriented magazines by writers who worked with Glass, assessing how Glass and the other characters are portrayed. Many of the reactions are surprisingly visceral; these people resent the personal betrayal by Glass almost more than his journalistic ethics violations – less “shame on him for lying to the magazine and its readers” and more “how could he lie to me?” His desperate desire to be liked is no excuse for compromising his moral code -- and, just watching him ladle on the syrup, I know I would hate him if I had to work with him -- but in the movie, at least, it does temper your reproach with pity.
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