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‘the glass castle’: film review.

Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts star in 'The Glass Castle,' the big-screen adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about her unconventional upbringing.

By Sheri Linden

Sheri Linden

Senior Copy Editor/Film Critic

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The ties that bind often embarrass or even shame, a near-universal reality that writer Jeannette Walls explored, unforgettably, through the extreme example of her childhood. Her book The Glass Castle — plainspoken, vivid and unputdownable — is equal parts loving tribute and pained confessional, resisting sentimentalism at every turn. Director Destin Daniel Cretton mostly manages to do the same, though his concessions to the expectation for big movie moments deliver occasionally strained results.

But the feature, which reunites the filmmaker with his Short Term 12 breakout star, Brie Larson , successfully captures the essence of the memoir, with exceptionally potent work by Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts as the spirited, self-involved and willfully impoverished bohemians who subjected their four kids to a peripatetic, hardscrabble life but also, in the process, taught them to fend for themselves.

Release date: Aug 11, 2017

Cretton and his co-writer, Andrew Lanham , zero in on the relationship between Jeannette and her father, Rex, who rails against capitalism, environmental degradation, racism and hypocrisy in all its varied forms, but is also sometimes simply a mean drunk, blind to his own tyrannical ways and the impact of his alcoholism on his family. As good as Harrelson is in the role of the charismatic, damaged idealist — and as good as the two young actresses are who play Jeannette in the sequences set in the 1960s and ’70s — other family dynamics get lost as the story veers into the realm of character study. Yet whatever its imbalances and flaws, the movie is sure to strike an emotional chord with the book’s many fans as well as newcomers to the remarkable tale.

The film moves back and forth between the childhood memories of Jeannette (Larson) and her life in 1989 Manhattan as a successful gossip columnist. With her parents living in a squat on the Lower East Side and scavenging through garbage in the streets, her denial and dissembling of her past are reaching a tipping point, spurred on by her engagement to financial adviser David ( Max Greenfield ), a standard-issue Wrong Boyfriend.

This element of the screenplay, the most significant departure from the source material, finds the story at its most generic and forced. That might be Cretton’s point: Jeannette, with her carefully coiffed hair and awful ’80s power dressing, is forcing herself into a role that doesn’t quite fit.

Yet if the storyline involving the adult Jeannette is all too obviously building toward catharsis, it offers the opportunity to see Larson and Watts face off across a restaurant booth in a pitch-perfect scene. The daughter sits ramrod-straight; her mother, Rose Mary, slurps up lo mein noodles and, stabbing the air with her chopsticks, declares, “Your values are all confused” — an apt response, if not a tactful one, to the way Jeannette flashes her ringed hand to announce that she’s engaged.

While Rex, brought to quicksilver life by Harrelson , falls on and off the wagon and in and out of employment, endlessly perfecting his blueprints for the glass, solar-powered dream house he swears he’ll build one day, Rose Mary makes her artistic expression as a painter her priority, bar none. Not even her children’s hunger can pull her away from the easel, as the very young Jeannette’s misadventure with a stove makes clear.

Cretton uses the harrowing domestic accident and the girl’s subsequent hospital stay as a way to introduce the family. Set to Joel P West’s upbeat, twangy music, the sequence has a somewhat overplayed comic energy, but it establishes the movie’s refusal to be maudlin. That reflects Rex and Rose Mary’s refusal to indulge the slightest whine from their kids, whether the family is fleeing creditors in the dead of night or the household has been devoid of food for days. Neither will they step in to protect their kids, the hands-off policy extending, disturbingly, to profoundly alarming complaints involving a horrid grandmother (Robin Bartlett, at once terrifying and pathetic) and, later, a barroom lech (Dominic Bogart).

The character of Jeannette, so prematurely parental, comes into focus through the exceptionally sensitive performances of Chandler Head, playing the 6-year-old version, and Ella Anderson as the alert, determined tween. By contrast her siblings, portrayed in adulthood by Sarah Snook, Josh Caras and Brigette Lundy-Paine , remain vaguely defined, with the experiences of youngest sister Maureen ( Lundy-Paine ) noticeably unexplored, her ordeals alluded to in a late scene that feels truncated.

But by and large, Glass Castle proceeds with a stripped-down fluency that suits Walls’ straightforward prose and sometimes draws directly from it. The nonintrusive camerawork by Brett Pawlak (one of several returning creative collaborators from Short Term 12 , as is Moonlight editor Nat Sanders) is in sync with Sharon Seymour’s superb production design. The settings shift along with the emotional terrain: the expansive desert of the family’s more hopeful years crisscrossing the Southwest; an oppressive darkness when they return to Rex’s native West Virginia, with its down-and-out economy and their barely functioning house; the well-appointed interiors of the high-powered New York where the grown-up Jeannette comes to terms with the complicated truth about her family.

However engineered certain aspects of the film are, however de rigueur the feel-good documentary material that caps the narrative, Cretton honors that complicated truth. Even while gesturing toward a redemptive sacred altar, a default mode for parenthood in many mainstream movies, the director lets the messy realities stand. And his fine cast makes them ring true — the selfishness and neglect, the confrontations brutal and tender, the pained silences and, not least, the gusts of pure, jagged joy.

Production companies: Lionsgate , Gil Netter Productions Distributor: Lionsgate Cast: Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson , Naomi Watts, Max Greenfield, Sarah Snook, Robin Bartlett, Ella Anderson, Chandler Head, Josh Caras , Shree Grace Crooks, Brigette Lundy-Paine , Charlie Shotwell , Iain Armitage , Sadie Sink, Olivia Kate Rice, Eden Grace Redfield, Joe Pingue , A.J. Henderson, Dominic Bogart Director: Destin Daniel Cretton Screenwriters: Destin Daniel Cretton , Andrew Lanham ; based on the book by Jeannette Walls Producers: Gil Netter, Ken Kao Executive producer: Mike Drake Director of photography: Brett Pawlak Production designer: Sharon Seymour Costume designers: Mirren Gordon-Crozier , Joy Hanae Lani Cretton Editor: Nat Sanders Composer: Joel P West Casting director: Ronna Kress

Rated PG-13, 127 minutes

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Review: Woody Harrelson as a Wild and Crazy Dad in ‘The Glass Castle’

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By A.O. Scott

Aug. 10, 2017

“The Glass Castle” wrestles with two conflicting impulses: the longing for order and the desire for wildness. The main object of that ambivalence is Rex Walls, a big-talking, big-dreaming ne’er-do-well played with the usual guile and gusto by Woody Harrelson.

Rex would qualify as a helicopter parent if that phrase referred to someone who encouraged his kid to pilot a chopper without proper training or safety equipment. If he and his wife, Rose Mary (Naomi Watts), don’t go quite that far, it may only be for lack of available aircraft. Their four children are, to use another slightly anachronistic idiom in reference to a story set mostly in the ’60s and ’70s, decidedly free range. At a swimming pool, Rex throws Jeannette, his second-oldest daughter, into deep water to teach her to swim. That’s hardly the craziest thing he does, but it’s a convenient metaphor for his approach to parenting.

Jeannette, played in middle childhood by a wonderfully shrewd and watchful young actress named Ella Anderson, will grow up to be played by Brie Larson and to grapple with adulthood in late-’80s New York, where she writes a gossip column. Eventually, she’ll also write a best-selling memoir of her hectic childhood, which has now been adapted into this uneven, conscientious film, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and written by Mr. Cretton and Andrew Lanham.

Lacking the book’s episodic sprawl and psychological nuance, their movie clings to its essential tension. Jeannette, her father’s favorite — his nickname for her is Mountain Goat — admires her parents’ free-spirited individualism even as she suffers amid the chaos of their chosen way of life. Money is always short, and the family often picks up and moves, one step ahead of bill collectors or law enforcement. Rose Mary paints landscapes, still lifes and portraits, while Rex, bouncing from job to job, conjures fantastical, almost-practical projects, like the solar-powered mansion that gives the movie its title.

The clan’s nomadic period, which takes up roughly the first half of Ms. Walls’s memoir, is truncated on screen, and the audience never gets a full dose of the paternal wanderlust that provides Jeannette’s childhood with its thrills and terrors. We spend more time in Welch, W.Va., Rex’s Appalachian hometown, to which he had vowed never to return. Once there, in the shadow of his sinister mother, Erma (Robin Bartlett), Rex starts drinking more and dreaming less. As his charm dissolves, he devolves from a mischievous daredevil into a ranting, tyrannical drunk.

Meanwhile, in the film’s back-and-forth time scheme, adult Jeannette tries to find a place for her past (and her parents, who are now squatting on Manhattan’s pre-gentrified Lower East Side) in her polished, professional existence. What this mostly means is trying to reconcile her attachment to Rex with her engagement to David, a sacrificial yuppie played by Max Greenfield. He’s not a bad guy, he just cares about money, material possessions and what other people think. All of that makes him, somewhat too obviously, Rex’s opposite.

While Jeannette’s attempt to deal with the men in her life provides “The Glass Castle” with a bit of drama (and some comic scenes as well), it’s frustrating to see the resourceful Ms. Larson pinioned between two showy male performers. Jeannette, the central voice and consciousness in the book, is an oddly blurred character on screen. And the film itself loses focus as it drifts toward the conventions of the coming-of-age story and the family-dysfunction melodrama.

Conformity wins out in the end. Not that Rex — or the indefatigable Mr. Harrelson — is ever really tamed. But Mr. Lanham and Mr. Cretton, who proved himself a sensitive, risk-taking filmmaker with “Short Term 12” (also starring Ms. Larson), couldn’t find a way to contain both the father’s anarchy and the daughter’s skeptical affection for him. The movie bogs down in dialogue-heavy obvious scenes, some of which refer to events in the book that didn’t make it onto the screen. It’s both too tidy and too messy, and at the same time neither quite wild nor quite sensible enough.

The Glass Castle Rated PG-13. Fussing, fighting, drinking and cussing. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes.

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