by Bennett Campbell Ferguson
Above: Mr. Sarsgaard in heated scene from the film
He’s not a star and even among
hardcore movie buffs, he’s only mildly popular.
Yet Peter Sarsgaard has a way of deftly handling any challenge that
comes his way. Case in point, in
“Shattered Glass” he takes on a quietly complex character whose intricacies he
manages to reveal, sometimes without even moving a muscle.
That character is Chuck Lane, a real-life reporter who
was the editor of The New Republic
Magazine in the late 1990s. As
editor, Lane was already embattled—he was faced with leading a team of
reporters who were still deeply loyal to their dismissed former boss, Michael
Kelly. But Lane faced an even greater
challenge when confronting Stephen Glass, a New
Republic writer whose work was built on an increasingly unstable stack of
lies about computer hackers, software conglomerates, and (strangest of all)
handheld urinals.
In “Shattered Glass,” Glass himself is played by Hayden Christensen,
who gamely chews the scenery as a character whose entire life is a
performance. But as Chuck, Mr. Sarsgaard
takes the opposite approach. As he
listens to Mr. Christensen’s haphazard babbling, his face is often stony, even
frozen. His eyes fix firmly in one
position; the corners of his mouth stay perpetually downturned.
Ultimately, what are truly fascinating are the
complexities Mr. Sarsgaard embodies as Chuck.
With his voice a voice that sounds like a chorus of timidly plucked
guitar strings, the actor captures the character’s low-key, recessive nature. But he also reveals a firm ferocity that’s comprised
of not only righteous anger, but fierce common sense. When Glass whiningly pleads to be taken to
the airport, Mr. Sarsgaard offers an irate but calmly definitive reply:
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
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