Film review: ‘Glass Castle’

Wrenching film based on a bestselling memoir by Jeannette Walls|

When you sit down to watch “The Glass Castle” your first question has to be: Is the title a metaphor? Oh, it is. As is almost everything else that happens in the film.

The titular structure boasts glass walls, glass doors, glass ceilings and even a glass spiral staircase. It is the solar-powered dream project of the intermittently employed father of four Rex Walls (Woody Harrelson), whose second daughter is Jeannette Walls (played in her youth by Chandler Head).

Soon after remarking on the glass castle blueprints, Rex and the family flee their creditors and head for the horizon line. They’re quickly offroading into a landscape dotted with Joshua trees that we learn are consequential because they survive on so little water. Jeannette’s mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts), a visual artist who works in the depressing-motel-room-oil-painting genre is heard to remark, “It’s the struggle that gives it its beauty.” Rex then pushes his frightened little girl toward a fire and explains that the yellow edges of the flame are the all-important zone between turbulence and order.

By the time Jeannette’s literally thrown into the deep end of a pool and told to, “sink or swim,” the metaphor-o-meter is broken and they’re aren’t even 30 minutes gone - you don’t have time to absorb one symbol before the next arrives.

After a series of sodden fiascos, Rex has no choice but to bring his family back to his hometown, Welch, West Virginia. There the Wallses live in a squalid cabin but build alongside it the foundation for the Glass Castle… which soon turns into a literal trash pit.

The film is based on a bestselling memoir by Jeannette Walls and you can feel each chapter’s cliffhanger ending. Ever a precocious ginger child, the onscreen Jeannette always speaks in the voice of an adult writer. You might have hoped that a film about a dysfunctional but somewhat literary family would remind you of the Sedaris clan, but no one in the movie is funny - the tone is much closer to the by-the-bootstraps mentality of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick stories.

In a Christmas scene the future scribe gets - you guessed it - a notebook and is told by her father that she might change the world with it. One supposes that Walls is telling it true in her memoir but she might have been well served to save some histrionics for the sequel.

All of these country scenes are recalled in flashback - we know that the barefooted Jeannette has turned into a frigid, pearls and up-do wearing Manhattanite (played by Brie Larson). The costumes and décor are meant to show how incorrect it is that the adult writer finds herself trapped in an airless apartment with her financial advisor fiancé David (Max Greenfield).

Director Destin Daniel Cretton teamed with Larson before on “Short Term 12,” a good film that threatened to veer into sentimentality in the last moments…“The Glass Castle” does more than veer. They’ve made the type of movie where the alcoholic dad gets tied to a bed and screams at his kids to bring him whiskey or he’ll die.

Harrelson, a fine actor who can often raise average material with his adroit shifts between darkness and light, has no such chance here. He whipsaws violently between poles, betrayed by a below-average hairpiece and a script that wrings him like a rag for every drop of sentimentality.

At first merely a machine for catharsis, the film grows even sourer when it turns into an apologia for a cruel alcoholic. In the end, the Walls siblings agree on a pleasant “Boy, he sure had his moments,” attitude that is contrary to logic and, for other children of abuse, a gross betrayal.

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