Shattered Glass is a tragedy in a minor key. It plays like some Pakula production, only for diminished stakes. There's the conspiracy that begins to unravel and the cock-of-the-walk grandstanding and the big epiphany moment, but in the end I found it hard to care much about the sniveling Glass and his asleep at the wheel colleagues. Oh, the august New Republic brought low by a fabulist former fact-checker who knew how to work the system! [Never have shots of highlighted terms to check been more cinematic!]
Feh. Big deal. The cinetrix can tell you from personal experience: Magazines are as insular and self-dramatizing as any other workplace; they just pay more lip service to notions about the public trust, forever forgetting that the vaunted public has ADD.
The performances are uniformly fine, but this indie superstar cast yields a couple of weird transcinematic moments. Call it six degrees of Chloe Sevigny. Rosario Dawson and Chloe work for different publications, so they never share the screen in Shattered Glass, but the cinetrix's mind wandered to Kids nonetheless. Nice to see Chloe got a promotion from her job in The Last Days of Disco, although it's rare to see someone move from books to magazines like that. Then there's the frisson when Peter Sarsgaard's Chuck Layne stares down Sevigny's Caitlin--it's John and Lana all over. And Melanie Lynskey: Shouldn't you be indulging in antipodal matricide alongside Kate Winslet?
But here's the thing that sets Shattered Glass apart from its paranoid progenitor All the President's Men: No one smokes. At a magazine. No one. That pretty much sums up the problem with Shattered Glass: The stakes aren't mortal; there's no smoke, no fire. Sarsgaard looks schlumpy enough to--you could drop him into the elevator next to Hoffman puffing away--but no. Surely, you think, those striving bright young things would have picked up the habit putting the college newspaper to bed, if not affected it later in a vain attempt to appear older on the job. Uh-huh. In the end, this smoke-free workplace rings more false than any fillip Stephen Glass ever committed to print.
FOC Scott Hamrah [who's been known to smoke the brand Godard used to spell out "Pour quoi?"] takes up the topic of celluloid smoking, asking "How can the banality of good health compete with Breathless?" in his excellent piece "Ashes to Ashes" in last Sunday's Boston Globe.
It seems more than a coincidence that the increasing blandness of the cultural landscape and the eradication of smoking have proceeded together. For while many of the producers of today's entertainments are still smokers themselves, that activity is disallowed in their creations. As sanitized versions of reality replace the investigations of a Godard or a Cassavetes, a cultural hole opens up to compete with the one in the ozone.
Keep an eye out for the missing cigarettes the next time you watch a movie. You know the smoke is wafting just off screen.
