For some strange reason, Bill Maher likes to pal around with Ann Coulter. You know who Ann Coulter is; the leggy blonde wackjob who spouts inflammatory things about liberals, Democratic presidential candidates, Muslims, and the occasional Jew. How Coulter gets away with what she does is anyone's guess. I guess the fact that her books contain pages and pages of footnotes snow her publisher's fact checkers. I guess also that the money her books make snows her publisher's fact checkers. Coulter is such a master at fabrication that even her buddy Bill Maher sputtered at her on one of last season's Real Life shows on HBO, "Ann, you just make shit up!"

Recently Jason Blair, another Maker Up of Shit without Coulter's connections, gams, silken locks, or ability to generate corporate profits; created a scandal at the New York Times, thereby pushing out of the limelight yet another journalist walking the fabrication beat. Stephen Glass, the smarmy former New Republic staffer who from 1995-1998 fabricated at least twenty-seven stories for the New Republic until he was fired, was stumping for his first novel, The Fabulist -- just in time to anticipate his on-screen portrayal in first-time director Billy Ray's terrific new film SHATTERED GLASS as not the zhlubby little self-effacing nebbish seen on a recent 60 Minutes segment, but a studious-looking cutie played by Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christensen.

Forget everything you ever thought about young Mr. Christensen, for given a role to play that does not require him to be yet another sullen teenager, he finds the layers of self-doubt that underlie Glass' lovable little brother schtick to reveal the terrified neurotic that lurks beneath the smarmy suckup. The story unfolds as Glass appears to relate his tale of journalistic glory to a class of rapt students, and switches back and forth between his storytelling and Glass' real experiences as his career at The New Republic begins to implode. As the Journalist Who Made It, he's charming and confident -- the man he'd like to be; but as his character emerges in flashback; he's sallow, pouty, with the stress of high expectations of himself combining with terrible self-esteem issues, as Christensen deftly unfolds the character's disintegration. He portrays Glass as having only a thin candy shell, underneath wihich lies one of those hopelessly neurotic people who seek constant reassurance by belittling their own accomplishments. After dazzling his colleagues with yet another rip-roaring story (which turns out to be false), he invariably says, "It's really silly, I know....I probably won't even go with it." Whether it's a co-worker's minor and temporary irritation, or his editor Charles Lane (Peter Saarsgard) trying to draw out the truth about his fabrications, he descends into the voice that is a hybrid of Too Much Therapy That Doesn't Go Anywhere and the four-year-old child who's terrified of Mommy's wrath: "Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me?" Or "I feel very attacked, here, Chuck." In descending into self-flagellation, assigning a more extravagant blame on himself than anyone else would even think to, he manages to turn himself into the wronged party. (If you have ever pulled this schtick, either at work or with your loved ones, and you know who you are, you'll vow to never do it again after seeing this film),

In the 1990's, The New Republic was what the Weekly Standard is today -- the de facto official magazine of Air Force One. With its staff of bright-eyed, idealistic, ambitious young writers, led by editor Michael Kelly (the first editor at TNR to be duped by Stephen Glass, whose last months at the Washington Post included some smarmy, suck-up pro-Bush propaganda before he was killed while covering the Iraq war in April 2003), TNR was THE political rag of the decade. Kelly was a doting father figure to his cadre of young proteges, and when he was fired after a disagreement with prickly TNR editor-in-chief Marty Peretz (played here by Ted Kotcheff) and replaced by the universally disliked Charles Lane, Glass felt under even more pressure and the fabrications began to escalate. In 1998, he wrote a story "Hacker Heaven" about a teenager who hacked into the systems of a company called Jukt Micronics, whereupon Jukt hired him as a security expert. Glass describes in the pitch meeting the entire story with all the bells and whistles, right down to the details of a "hacker's convention" that never took place. Director Billy Ray allows Glass himself, speaking to the classroom, to detail the many stages of edits and fact-checks that a story goes through, to illustrate just how astounding it is that Glass was able to get away with it.

When Adam Penenberg (Steve Zahn), a journalist for the online publication Forbes Digital tool, is chastised by his editor for not getting a scoop like this, he digs around and discovers that nothing in the story adds up, thus setting the stage for Glass' downfall.

For all that SHATTERED GLASS is Stephen Glass' story, the impact on and effect of the scandal on Chuck Lane are important to note, and since there's only so much of a self-indulgent neurotic like Glass that an audience is going to want to sit through, director Billy Ray expertly shifts the audience's sympathies from the struggling young liar to the man cast only reluctantly into the role of Boss, whose own reputation is at stake from the scandal. Peter Saarsgard, a marvelously subtle actor, sometimes to the point of seeming nearly asleep, is nearly perfect as Chuck Lane. With his bland good looks and hooded eyes, Saarsgard has a constant aura of wariness that suits this role. The film shows Lane both at home and at work, and portrays him as a man who takes Duty seriously.

Hank Azaria, miscast as the chubby-cheeked Michael Kelly, makes his character perhaps a bit too saintly, even if we're supposed to see him through Stephen Glass' eyes. But fine supporting work is also provided by Chloe Sevigny as a fictional factchecker loosely based on Hanna Rozen and Steve Zahn as Adam Penenberg.

Director/screenwriter Billy Ray would seem unlikely to have the chops to create a film as good as this one. The pen behind such dubious efforts as the Bruce Willis bomb Color of Night, Volcano, and the earnest if forgettable Hart's War, Ray has here created a tightly wound cautionary tale that plays like a thriller. Ray is careful not to glamorize his protagonist, even though it could be argued that for someone like Stephen Glass, any attention, even negative, is better than none. He bathes the fantasy scenes, in which Glass is shown enacting his role in the stories he's fabricated, in a warm glow, which particularly in the opening sequence at a political memorabilia convention, play like Naomi Watts' equally "oh gosh" -- and equally imaginary -- moments in Mulholland Drive. Otherwise, Christensen is photographed in a greenish tint that makes him look sallow and washed-out -- a journalistic deer in the headlights of truth. When Glass' fabrication about the "Hacker Heaven" article begins to unravel in a conference call with the editor of Forbes Digital Tool, Ray has the camera pan back and forth between Saarsgard and Christensen, the former showing Lane's growing, if reluctant realization that his young staffer has duped him, and the latter squirming valiantly, using all the guile and victimology he can muster in an attempt to salvage his career. It's a beautifully acted and composed scene, and is nearly as uncomfortable for the viewer to sit through as it must have been for the protagonists. Following this excruciating scene, Lane is shown perusing a wall of previous New Republic issues. Dead smack in the center is one emblazoned with the title of a cover story: "The Big Lie." That's one he DOESN'T pull off the wall to examine for fabrications.

It's no mean feat to create suspense in a story the outcome of which we already know, but just as Michael Mann did in The Insider, Billy Ray manages to do so here. He deftly handles the balancing act required in order to tell this tale so as to neither glorify nor demonize Stephen Glass, and manages to build the viewer's interest in an outcome we already know.

Hank Azaria has said that the real Michael Kelly regarded Stephen Glass as a pathological liar and sociopath, who was simply addicted to the con, to the thrill of tricking people -- Frank Abagnale as nebbish. I believe this interpretation of Glass' actions gives him entirely too much credit. My five-cent analysis, based on Glass' recent interview with 60 Minutes and this film, is that he's nothing but a yet another case of a frightened who lives in adult body but is still trying mightily to please an overly critical parent for whom nothing he does will ever measure up. How anyone could have fallen for this schtick is still a mystery to me. Perhaps I've just known too many people like Stephen Glass.

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