Stephen Glass, Earnest Reporter

There is no easy way to make a film about Stephen Glass. The story of The New Republic's one-time wunderkind who, in the summer of 1998, was discovered to have fabricated all or parts of twenty-seven stories, presents a challenge. Do you portray the world as the pathological liar saw it, endlessly exaggerated and contorted into a more beautiful and exciting place? Or do you concentrate on the sickness of the liar, a pathetic character, maladjusted and stranded in the adult world?

The recently released "Shattered Glass" is Hollywood's crack at the story of the then twenty-five-year-old writer's demise. In excruciating detail, the quick unraveling of Glass's lies is presented for us to examine anew.

For those who have chosen to forget, Glass's deceptions were exposed after a reporter from Forbes Digital Tool (an online publication, now-defunct) tried to verify the sources in an outlandish story Glass had written. The article was about a fifteen-year-old computer hacker who had broken into the system of a large software company and was being rewarded for his effort with a contract to fix the company's database. The online reporter couldn't find the hacker, the hacker's agent, the company, or even any trace of a bizarre computer hacker's convention where Glass said the deal had taken place.

When The New Republic's editor, Charles Lane, asked the young reporter to demonstrate the existence of the people and places in the piece, Glass went into a kind of liar's overdrive. He created a fake Web site and newsletter, set up fake voicemail and e-mail accounts, and even convinced his brother to pose on the phone as the CEO quoted in the story. Lane finally insisted on driving with Glass to Bethesda, where the article's events supposedly took place. Trapped at last, Glass broke down and, weeping, admitted to fabricating the story. An investigation into Glass's earlier pieces would reveal that more than half the articles he had written for the magazine were more fiction than fact.

The film answers the difficult question of point of view by handing the story to Glass to tell. To those disgusted with his misdeeds, this will have the frustrating effect of making his deception somewhat less repugnant than what real life has told us. Although Glass is not glamorized, we do live his wild fantasies with him as if they were reality -- we watch him eagerly taking notes at the imagined meeting between the adolescent, pimply hacker and the software company's CEO -- and the result is a not-so-unsympathetic portrait of a desperate and imaginative striver who fails because he tries too hard to succeed.

This is certainly how the actor portraying Glass, Hayden Christensen, who gained fame playing Anakin Skywalker in the most recent Star Wars film, sees it. In the production notes, he reveals that Glass, in his eyes, is no villain. "He's in no way a malicious, conniving person. He's none of those things," Christensen says. "Even though what he did wasn't appropriate, especially considering his line of work, he was still trying to make something of himself, for good reasons." (Compare that character assessment to one by Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic's longtime literary editor. Speaking about Glass in a recent "60 Minutes" segment, Wieseltier said, simply, "He's a worm.")

This is not to say that Glass comes off as the hero of the movie. He is seen, in fact, as a sniveling, apologetic, self-conscious baby in oversized glasses, constantly asking friends and editors, "Are you mad at me?" And there are moments when you certainly get a glimpse of his pathology -- when he, of all people, is reprimanding a rookie reporter for having "shaky facts," when you see the energy he has to expend to cover his tracks, and when he manipulates his colleagues and his former editor, the late Michael Kelly, into backing him when he is clearly lying.