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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

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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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Review: ‘The Glass Castle’ is an unconventional-family tale with heart and a strong performance by Woody Harrelson

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“I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.”

That’s the unnerving first sentence of Jeannette Walls’ 2005 memoir, “The Glass Castle,” and its audacious combination of candor, unsentimentality and sheer storytelling skill illustrates both why it spent 261 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and why, intensely dramatic though it is, this story was a long shot to become the tough and touching film, honest and heartfelt, it largely turns out to be.

For to do justice to the flat-out Dickensian childhood Walls and her siblings experienced with the nominal adults who were both the worst and best of parents, it’s necessary to understand the balance between breaking away from and accepting a torturous past that is the book’s essence.

Director and co-screenwriter Destin Daniel Cretton, whose last film was the richly emotional “Short Term 12,” is at home with that dynamic. Adapting Walls’ book with Andrew Lanham, Cretton appreciates, with minimal missteps, that the complexities of the parent-child connection can create roiling emotions that are not as mutually exclusive as they seem.

Starring as Jeannette is Brie Larson, an Oscar winner for “Room,” whose empathetic performance was the heart of “Short Term 12.” The structure of “Glass Castle,” however, prevents her from dominating in the same way here.

While Walls’ authorial voice holds the book’s multiple time frames together, the nature of the narrative demands that three different actresses, Larson and two excellent pre-teen performers, Ella Anderson and Chandler Head, share the role.

Filling what might otherwise be a connectivity gap are the only actors we follow through the entire film, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson, as Jeannette’s way-off-the-grid parents, Rose Mary and Rex Walls.

The always reliable Watts is excellent, bringing integrity and strength to the supporting role of Jeannette’s mother, a self-absorbed artist who was more interested in her work (examples of which are in the film) than in her children.

The heart of the reason “Glass Castle” succeeds as well as it does, however, is Woody Harrelson’s splendid starring performance as her uncategorizable father. Larger than life in both good and bad ways, Rex is brilliant and dangerous, both bully and savior, a tormented man who inspired as well as plagued his children, someone whose increasingly serious drinking and the behavior it caused undercut the genuine love he had for his family.

The veteran Harrelson, who has described his own life as far from conventional, thoroughly understands Rex from the inside, immersing himself in the role of this charismatic man in a way that allows us to see both how compelling and how dangerous a parent he was.

“Glass Castle’s” story begins in 1989, with Larson’s adult Jeannette firmly established as a Manhattan media figure who writes New York Magazine’s gossipy Intelligencer column.

We’re introduced to Jeannette joining her fiancé, David (Max Greenfield), a button-downed financial advisor, at dinner with potential clients. After dinner (and after telling David “when it comes to my family, let me do the lying”), she looks out of a cab window to see her parents, who are squatting in an abandoned building, in full Dumpster-dive mode.

That vision leads to a lunch with Rose Mary, where her mother both tries to walk off with everything edible that isn’t tied down and tells Jeannette that her values are all confused and she couldn’t possibly be happy with her materialistic life.

“Glass Castle’s” structure alternates that New York present with flashbacks to Jeannette’s childhood experiences, starting at age 3 when, played by Chandler Head, she was cooking hot dogs over a gas flame and her dress caught on fire.

When officious hospital authorities (there were no other kind as far as Rex was concerned) eventually ask questions about why none of Jeannette’s siblings was at school, Rex busts her out of the place and the family takes off on yet another of an endless series of town changes that happened when things got too difficult. Which was often.

Careening off road into a desert when a child mentions “real school,” Rex proclaims that “this is as real as it gets. You learn from living, everything else is a damned lie.”

While “Glass Castle” takes pains to show Rex’s positive aspects, like his plan to build the all-glass, solar-powered structure that gives the book its name, those wane for Jeannette (now played by Ella Anderson) once she gets older and Rex’s drinking increases.

Things get worse once Rex reluctantly moves the family back to his hometown of Welch, W.Va., (Robin Bartlett is tiptop as intimidating mother Erma) and Jeannette comes to feel that the freedom her father touts seems a lot like chaos.

These complexities of plot and emotion make Walls’ memoir a difficult feat to pull off as a film. Though he is on less certain ground during the narrative’s moments of warmth than when things are grim, director Cretton manages it all successfully. With Woody Harrelson as its dependable lodestar, “The Glass Castle” never loses its sense of direction or its belief in where it’s going.

Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content involving family dysfunction, and for some language and smoking

Running time: 2 hours, 7 minutes

Playing: In general release

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The Glass Castle Reviews

It’s depiction of the dark side of Janet Walls’ painful childhood is clear-eyed, visceral, and hard to watch. But it badly undersells a significant part of this profoundly penetrating true story.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 21, 2022

Neither a faithful adaptation nor a film that leaves you feeling good about its manipulations.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 22, 2022

Despite addiction being one of the main themes of the film, The Glass Castle fails to adequately address the issue.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Sep 10, 2021

As a character study, The Glass Castle is a fascinating glimpse at the intersection of love, abuse, compassion, neglect, broken promises, and familial duties.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/5 | Sep 25, 2020

It's a noble effort at best, and a grueling example of a true story that rarely feels authentic the rest of the time.

Full Review | May 12, 2020

The Glass Castle is the kind of film which used to be more common but doesn't appear so often anymore -- at least to this extent of quality, profile and budget.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 27, 2020

[D]espite its flaws, The Glass Castle... connects powerfully to what it feels like to be a child when adults make all the rules.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2020

Shine intermittently, especially for its cast - especially Woody Harrelson - and at least it doesn't waste your time despite leaving you with a bittersweet taste. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 8, 2019

I thought it was morally repugnant and disgusting... these parents belonged in jail.

Full Review | Original Score: F | Mar 11, 2019

A serviceable and engaging account of Walls' story, though you can almost see the Hollywood machination at work.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 22, 2019

Director Destin Daniel Cretton does an admirable job steering the film tonally, with only a handful of moments that veer fully into the oncoming traffic of the melodramatic.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 11, 2019

It's got a talented cast that manage to create a few powerful moments, but overall the film feels contrived and hollow. Unlike the book.

Full Review | Feb 1, 2019

A flawed, but promising family drama, The Glass Castle might be fairly accused of playing things too even-handed.

Full Review | Dec 19, 2018

The Glass Castle is tonally uneven and haphazard, and intentionally so. It accurately captures the experience of living in a dysfunctional family...

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 24, 2018

The story is about imperfection, in person and in family, so if the film is imperfect, it can be forgiven.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Oct 31, 2018

The tone jumps wildly between quirky family dramedy and the dark terrain of abuse narratives without finding the proper balance.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 5, 2018

The Glass Castle remains as transparent and ethereal as the architectural wonder in its title because its treatment of its material is so rote.

Full Review | Aug 28, 2018

The Glass Castle is a study in the power of family ties --and the resilience of children to overcome even the harshest of circumstances.

Full Review | Aug 26, 2018

The movie has a phenomenal cast and a connection between the characters that gives it just the push it needs.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 21, 2018

The magic of Cretton lies in his ability to make [The Glass Castle's] characters multidimensional beings, their stories are true tapestries. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 14, 2018

The Glass Castle (2017)

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Film Review: ‘The Glass Castle’

Brie Larson reunites with her 'Short Term 12' director to play gossip columnist Jeannette Walls, whose childhood proved to be her best story.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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You know that feeling that comes when a well-told biopic reaches the end and you finally see photos of the real-life figures behind the characters, where you can’t help but marvel at how thoroughly the actors seem to have absorbed the people they’re playing? “The Glass Castle” wraps with one of those slideshows, except this time, the people — New York gossip columnist Jeannette Walls and her family — may as well be aliens, that’s how different the end-credits photos and footage seem from the movie itself.

That’s not to say the two-plus hours that came before haven’t been moving. But there’s a fire behind unconventional patriarch Rex Walls’ eyes — and a sense of tragedy hidden by Rex’s square-jawed, movie-star handsome face — that was completely absent from Woody Harrelson ’s otherwise powerful performance as the man who made life so hard for Jeannette and her siblings. And while it’s exciting to see Brie Larson working with “Short Term 12” director Destin Daniel Cretton again, she’s not in the film nearly enough, since so much of Jeannette’s story is told in flashback featuring different actors as her younger self.

There’s a documentary moment there at the end when Jeannette’s mother, the real-life Rose Mary (who seems much closer to the proud, uncompromising woman Naomi Watts has portrayed for the rest of the film), remarks on how Jeannette’s book captured the poetic, paradoxical soul of her father, whereas older sister Lori only resented him for raising them wrong. Such things are all a matter of perspective, and so too is Cretton’s adaptation, which tells a story not unlike last year’s terrific “Captain Fantastic” — about another family of anti-establishment off-the-grid squatters — but does so from the POV of a daughter who carries both the psychic and physical scars of that experience, who spent her early years packing up and moving on whenever her father ran afoul of the law or the bill collectors caught up with them.

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Early on, Cretton features a scene in which Rex is away (probably on one of his famous drinking binges) and Rose Mary is too busy painting to feed her daughter, whom she orders to go and make her own meal unsupervised. Standing too close to the stove, Jeannette’s dress catches fire, and she winds up in the hospital with third degree burns — an injury that becomes a metaphor for so much of her childhood. For decades she lived with the shame of how she was raised, the reminder of which was branded into her torso, hiding that aspect of her past from others (when asked about her parents, she would lie, rather than admit that they were essentially homeless, scraping by in the same city where she had become a successful gossip columnist).

“The Glass Castle” catches up with Walls at the moment in her life when she finally came to terms with her father (which has taken a bit of creative fictionalization, but remains remarkably true to the book): She’s engaged to a successful investment banker (Max Greenfield) and looks like a character out of “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” with her fancy high-society hairdo, pearl necklace and stiff-shouldered blouse. No one would guess that this charming, seemingly cultured woman once ate a stick of butter and sugar because there had been nothing else in the house — a house without running water or electricity.

The title of Walls’ memoir refers to the house that Rex was always promising to build for them — yet another metaphor, this one for the big dreams and alleged brilliance of a man who rejected society’s group-think rules, self-teaching his children (three girls and a boy) while living in what others might think of as squalor, poverty and ignorance. Walls comes right out and describes Rex as “brilliant” at one point, though that’s one dimension of the character Harrelson never quite captures — whereas crazy, drunk and capable of howling like a wolf in public situations all come easy. On one hand, Rex wanted his kids to be independent thinkers — as when he quite literally threw Jeannette in the deep end so she would learn to swim — but he never once permitted them to question his authority.

By any standard, Walls has reason to be resentful of her upbringing, but she also has the humility to recognize that Rex and Rose Mary’s unique approach to parenting is at least partly responsible for shaping her into who she is today. It’s not easy trying to navigate that paradox in retelling her story, and yet, it’s the aspect to which Cretton seems best suited: The director has a deeply empathetic sensibility, which comes through in his approach. Despite Rex’s temper and his undeniable capacity for cruelty, he’s not a villain, but a complex human being.

And yet, unlike the stunningly realistic “Short Term 12,” which was directly informed by Cretton’s work with foster kids, the details here don’t come from his own experience. Rather, they’re lifted from Walls’ book and as a result feel too obviously reenacted — the way the wigs and dye jobs (nearly all the characters are redheads) are meant to lend authenticity, but instead create a level of artifice. Something similar happened to Nick Flynn’s “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,” in which the author stumbled across his estranged dad while working in a Boston homeless shelter. Adapted for the screen as “Being Flynn,” the movie wound up serving as an homage to a beautifully written book, instead of an emotional story in its own right.

Here, we understand that her book was meaningful to many, but it’s not terribly engaging as told. We know she survived the ordeal, so there’s no suspense, and it’s hard to be invested in whether or not she reconciles with Rex before his death. Cretton captures the incidents of Walls’ childhood (too many of them, to be honest, as the film really ought to be half an hour shorter), but struggles to connect them to the grown woman Larson plays in the present. Here is a successful New York gossip columnist whose own story was juicier than practically any she uncovered in her day job, and yet, despite its running time, it offers at best a fragmented portrait of how she was personally shaped by having a father as unique as Rex Walls.

Reviewed at RealD screening room, Los Angeles, Aug. 4, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 127 MIN.

• Production: A Lionsgate release and presentation of a Gill Netter, Lionsgate production. Producers: Netter, Ken Kao. Executive producer: Mike Drake.
• Crew: Director: Destin Daniel Cretton. Screenplay: Cretton, Andrew Lanham, based on the book by Jeannette Walls. Camera (color): Brett Pawlak. Editor: Nat Sanders. Music: Joel P. West.
• With: Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Max Greenfield, Sara Snook, Naomi Watts, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Sadie Sink, Charlie Shotwell, Ella Anderson, Eden Grace Redfield.

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The Glass Castle Review

No matter where we go or what we do with our lives, there's no changing where we came from or who was there with us as we grew up. For better or for worse, our childhoods define us, and few people have ever experienced a childhood as bizarre and turbulent as New York Times best-selling author Jeannette Walls. Destin Daniel Cretton's The Glass Castle is the silver screen take on Jeannette's life story, and while the film sometimes gets bogged down in cliché and a palpable sense of melodrama, the two lead performances and strength of execution definitely make it worth a watch.

Chronicling events that actually transpired in the life of author Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle follows the writer (portrayed as an adult by Brie Larson ) as she navigates her seemingly perfect life as a gossip columnist in 1989. Engaged to a wealthy New York businessman named David (Max Greenfield), Jeannette does everything in her power to avoid revealing much about her past -- until she comes across her mother Mary ( Naomi Watts ) and her father Rex ( Woody Harrelson ) living as squatters in the city. Following this encounter, memories of Jeannette's childhood come flooding back to her, and she finds herself forced to grapple with the traumatic events that occurred at the hands of her alcoholic (yet well-intentioned) father.

Right off of the bat, it's easy to see that Brie Larson (reuniting with Cretton after her star-making performance in Short Term 12 ) and Woody Harrelson fire on all cylinders in this movie. Though Max Greenfield and Naomi Watts often find themselves shortchanged by the material given to them, Larson and Harrelson are absolutely magnetic as an estranged father-daughter duo. Harrelson, in particular, delivers a career-best performance as the hard-drinking Rex Walls, and the actor conveys a notable sadness and empathetic sensibility -- even when Rex does things that are objectively abhorrent. Harrelson has two Oscar nominations to his name for The Messenger and The People vs. Larry Flynt , but The Glass Castle could potentially be the one that turns him from Academy Award Nominee Woody Harrelson into Academy Award Winner Woody Harrelson.

Brie Larson similarly does an incredible job embodying her role, which it is even more impressive when you learn that Jennifer Lawrence was actually the first choice for the role before dropping out. However, the use of flashbacks gives her considerably less screen time and forces her to share Jeannette with several other talented young actresses like Ella Anderson and Chandler Head, thus making Harrelson the de facto "star" of the show.

That said, although The Glass Castle is an adaptation of a wildly successful memoir, it is also sometimes hard to shake the sense that certain sequences in the movie feel ripped straight from "Oscar Bait 101." From a scene in which Rex drives his family out into the middle of the desert to camp under the stars and experience "real" life, to an emotional alcohol detox scene, it is sometimes hard to shake the sense that we have seen moments like these in other movies. They are the type of moments that get played during reels at awards ceremonies, and it sometimes lends the cynical sense that The Glass Castle knows exactly what it is trying to achieve with its particular form of storytelling.

That's not to say that Destin Daniel Cretton doesn't handle most of these (admittedly cliché) scenes with a deft hand. There is a high degree of filmmaking prowess on display in The Glass Castle 's cinematography, and a few of the movie's more emotional sequences maintain a decidedly raw tone that almost makes you forget that the film has a PG-13 rating. Perhaps most notably, there's a scene towards the middle of the movie in which an inebriated Rex attempts to teach Jeannette to swim at a public pool. Mostly shot in one take, the sequence starts off innocent enough but builds in tension as the audience begins to realize just how far Rex is willing to go to show off his unorthodox parenting style. It's sequences like this one that make The Glass Castle work as well as it does, but they can only work so well when the narrative foundation (much like the foundation of an actual glass castle) can't hold it up.

Ultimately, the biggest issue with The Glass Castle is the fact that the scenes that catch up with adult Jeannette Walls in 1989 simply don't carry the same amount of weight as the film's flashbacks. The "present day" sequences are meant to work in tandem with the flashbacks in order to help flesh out the story of the Walls family, but the flashbacks simply have so much more meat on their bones that you start to wait for them whenever the film cuts back to adult Jeannette. It's obviously important to see the long-term consequences of the Rex-Jeannette relationship, but the film could've done a better job of investing us in both arcs.

Let me be clear; The Glass Castle is the furthest thing from a bad movie. It tells an emotionally rich story replete with Oscar-caliber performances and some impressive visuals. The only issue is the fact that it depicts a somewhat conventional and cliché arc that builds to an emotional yet still predictable and unsatisfying climax. There's an abundance of talent on display in The Glass Castle , but the story of the Walls family never rises to the occasion and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Originally from Connecticut, Conner grew up in San Diego and graduated from Chapman University in 2014. He now lives in Los Angeles working in and around the entertainment industry and can mostly be found binging horror movies and chugging coffee.

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The glass castle, common sense media reviewers.

Strong acting, intense themes in emotional book-based drama.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The kind of upbringing portrayed in the movie is t

Walls is portrayed as a survivor and a person with

A child is burned with boiling water and goes to t

A man tries to coax a woman into sex. Couples are

Somewhat infrequent uses of foul language, includi

A supporting character has a drinking problem; he

Parents need to know that The Glass Castle is an intense drama based on Jeannette Walls' best-selling memoir. It tells the story of a very dysfunctional family. There's a frequent underlying threat of violence, and children are portrayed as seriously hungry and occasionally in peril: a young girl burns…

Positive Messages

The kind of upbringing portrayed in the movie is troubling; while the children develop a love of reading and exceptional intelligence and creativity, they also endure pain, hunger, and other hardships. The movie doesn't necessarily condone or celebrate these things.

Positive Role Models

Walls is portrayed as a survivor and a person with a positive outlook, despite going through hard times -- and harder emotions -- in order to arrive in that place.

Violence & Scariness

A child is burned with boiling water and goes to the hospital. Children are shown being hungry, thrown in the deep end of a pool, etc., as part of their impoverished and very unconventional upbringing. Parents argue and throw things. A man is punched. Mild, general sense of fear/threat.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A man tries to coax a woman into sex. Couples are comfortable/intimate with one another.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Somewhat infrequent uses of foul language, including one use of "f--k," "s--t," "son of a bitch," "ass," "hell," "crap," "goddamn," etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A supporting character has a drinking problem; he appears staggering drunk and violent. He tries to quit and goes through painful detox. Supporting characters smoke cigarettes.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Glass Castle is an intense drama based on Jeannette Walls' best-selling memoir. It tells the story of a very dysfunctional family. There's a frequent underlying threat of violence, and children are portrayed as seriously hungry and occasionally in peril: a young girl burns herself with boiling water, children are thrown into the deep end of a pool, and so on. Their parents also shout, argue, and throw things. Language isn't frequent but includes words like "s--t," "ass," and "damn." There are sexual situations (a man tries and fails to seduce a woman) and couples being intimately comfortable with one another. A key character has a drinking problem. He's shown staggering drunk and abusive and goes through painful detox while quitting. Another character smokes. Brie Larson , Woody Harrelson , and Naomi Watts co-star. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (7)
• Kids say (4)

Based on 7 parent reviews

A few touchy scenes not mentioned in review

Lot's of emotion, especially if you had struggles in childhood., what's the story.

In THE GLASS CASTLE, Jeanette ( Brie Larson ) has an uncomfortable dinner out with her fiancé, David ( Max Greenfield ). On the way home, she spots her parents, Rex ( Woody Harrelson ) and Rose Mary ( Naomi Watts ), digging through the trash. She then remembers her childhood, when she, her parents, and her siblings (two sisters and a brother) would go on the run every time her father lost a job. Jeanette remembers the wondrous times, such as planning the "glass castle" that they hoped to build someday, or Rex letting the children choose their very own star as a Christmas present. But she also remembers the difficult times, including their lack of food, Rex's drinking, and the time Jeanette burned herself as a child while boiling hot dogs. Back in the present, Jeanette's troubles start again when she finds that her parents have followed her and her siblings to New York.

Is It Any Good?

Based on Walls' best-selling memoir, this drama could have been edgier, but it follows a certain genre type, comfortably presenting itself as a four-hankie weepie graced with fine performances. You might think that writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton -- whose previous film was the excellent, emotionally complex and nuanced Short Term 12 -- would give the same treatment to The Glass Castle . But, like any classic tearjerker melodrama, it's painted with broader, more basic strokes.

Each scene is designed more to coax a response from the audience than to find a deeper, more vivid truth about the characters. Nevertheless, the great cast is treated well, and the actors get many big moments to shine. Harrelson treads a fine line between Rex's extremes of abuse and wonder, and Watts' Rose Mary emerges with her own personality and desires; she's far more than just a "wife." Larson (who also starred in Short Term 12 ) ties it all together, shuffling through stages of betrayal, rage, hope, and love. The exceptional Sarah Snook has less to do here, but she manages a few small, powerful moments. These performances are the reason to watch.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Glass Castle 's violence . How much is shown? How much more feels like it's simmering under the surface, threatening? How does the movie achieve this? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

How does the movie portray drinking and smoking ? Are they glamorized? Are there realistic consequences? Why does that matter?

If you've read Walls' memoir, how does the movie compare to the book? What changed from page to screen? Why do you think those changes were made?

What positive things did Rex and Rose Mary teach their children? What not-so-positive things happened in their family? Were the good things worth the bad things?

Teens: Have you ever felt frustrated by or angry at your parents? Why? How did you deal with it?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 11, 2017
• On DVD or streaming : November 7, 2017
• Cast : Brie Larson , Naomi Watts , Woody Harrelson
• Director : Destin Daniel Cretton
• Inclusion Information : Asian directors, Female actors
• Studio : Lionsgate
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Book Characters , Brothers and Sisters
• Run time : 127 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : mature thematic content involving family dysfunction, and for some language and smoking
• Last updated : June 3, 2023

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The Glass Castle review – treacly, tiresome family-in-peril drama

Woody Harrelson is infuriating as a life-affirming wildman who is also a cruel and feckless dad intent on leading his wife and kids into danger

Woody Harrelson gives a performance of borderline unwatchable hamminess in this really tiresome film, which sentimentally neutralises parental abuse into a supposedly fascinating angel/devil split. Admittedly, this isn’t as purely insufferable as Viggo Mortensen in the comparably wince-inducing Captain Fantastic . But almost. A radioactive sentimentality oozes from the screen, although it is saved, just a little, by the robustness of Brie Larson ’s presence.

The film is based on a bestselling 2005 memoir by US columnist and author Jeannette Walls, about her anarchic upbringing at the hands of an alcoholic, bipolar dad, who always kept his bewildered wife and kids on the move, one step ahead of the debt collectors, rattling all across the country. He is Rex, a brilliant but feckless individual: free-thinker, scientist and engineer, entrancing his trusting and saucer-eyed children with his plans to build them a glass castle of his own design. But his whisky and indiscipline keeps them hungry and confused and often in danger from stove hobs etc. 

Harrelson plays him as a life-affirming wildman, glamorised as a rebel that you hate for his cruelty but of course can’t help loving for his adorable passion. Naomi Watts gets to play his dozy, feather-brained wife, and Larson plays his daughter Jeannette in disillusioned later years, an uptight and controlling career woman who has utterly rejected her dad’s anti-materialism in ways that are intended to suggest that maybe she’s kind of got it wrong and just needs to heal. 

The film is structured in such a way that you consent to an insidious balance: loathing and loving Rex before finally giving him the benefit of the doubt. A rigged game, as Rex himself occasionally rants, and a shallow, treacly piece of work.

• Drama films
• Brie Larson
• Woody Harrelson
• Naomi Watts

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The Glass Castle Review

06 Oct 2017

127 minutes

The Glass Castle

On paper, The Glass Castle is something to get excited about. It marks the reunion of Brie Larson and Destin Daniel Cretton, the star and director of 2013’s Short Term 12 — a mini indie masterpiece that should jump ahead of everything on your must-watch list if you’ve never seen it. And the source material, American journalist Jeannette Walls’ memoir about growing up in an eccentric ’70s family, suggests the kind of interesting character dynamics that made Larson and Cretton’s first film together so great. Sadly, The Glass Castle doesn’t totally deliver on its pedigree, an exasperating confection of great performances, meandering scenes, sweet moments, off-the-peg characers and a resolution that is at once trite yet affecting.

It could have been so much more.

Put simply, The Glass Castle is Captain Fantastic without the laughs. The film flits between the ’80s with Larson as successful gossip writer Walls — we know it’s the ’80s because her hair is huge — living with a Totally Wrong Fiancé (Max Greenfield) and her unconventional ’70s upbringing with nomadic parents, drunken dreamer Rex (Woody Harrelson) and artist Rose Mary (Naomi Watts). As the family — Walls has three siblings — move from town to town, warm moments (a lovely scene with Rex and Jeannette stargazing) butt up against harrowing vignettes (Rex teaching Jeannette to swim by just lobbing her around a swimming pool) in scenes that feel repetitive and don’t move the action on.

Surprisingly, given the nuance in Short Term 12 , Cretton is unable to find any telling details or insight in any of this; instead there is more of a TV movie feel. This also feeds into his filmmaking, which save a couple of uses of slow motion and a raw handheld camera in a fight scene, is unobtrusive but bland. Where he does shine, though, is with his cast. Harrelson gives Rex intelligence and a befuddled kind of menace but with enough turn-on-a-dime charm that makes you believe the family would stay together. Watts, too, registers as an artsy Earth mother type but has real bite in a confrontation with her grown-up daughter over noodles. Larson is good, but the flashback structure doesn’t really give her enough to sink her teeth into — it’s a bit like watching a Formula 1 car never getting out of first gear. It’s just as well, then, that Chandler Head and Ella Anderson, playing six-year-old and tween Jeannette respectively, are terrific, playing difficult scenes without being too saccharine or movie-kid wise.

By the time the two story strands come together — late teens Jeannette (now played by Larson) resolves to strike out on her own; super successful Jeannette reconnects with her parents living rough in New York — the resolution feels forced, convenient and predictable. But, even forced, convenient and predictable can move you when you have great actors. It just could have been so much more.

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The Glass Castle turns a best-selling memoir into a moving but flawed film

Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson star in real-life tale of family dysfunction.

by Alissa Wilkinson

If you buy something from a Vox link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

Writing memoir is really hard, for a simple reason: Our lives are messy. They’re rarely structured like a story, with clearly defined characters, conflict, resolution, and a narrative arc. Sometimes the effects of certain events don’t become evident for years — if they ever do at all.

So to write a memoir, you have to look closely at a pile of seemingly random events from your own life, find the story, and make it compelling to readers. And in writing her 2005 memoir The Glass Castle , Jeannette Walls pulled this off — the book, which tells the story of her dysfunctional upbringing, garnered strong reviews, spent 271 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list ( more than six years ), and sold almost 3 million copies .

And now, 12 years later, the memoir has been adapted into an engaging and often touching film. Though The Glass Castle exhibits some of the common problems that arise when telling true stories (which means it can be frustrating at times), it will still resonate with anyone who has complicated feelings about a complicated family.

The Glass Castle tells the story of a roving, difficult upbringing through parallel timelines

Movies and memoirs alike are rife with difficult parents, but Rex Walls ( Woody Harrelson ), the ball of charisma and catastrophe at the center of The Glass Castle , is an unusual breed. He’s an alcoholic, a socially conscious hippie drifter, a veteran, a loving father, and something of a genius who hails from the backwoods of Welch, West Virginia.

Rex, his artist wife Rose ( Naomi Watts ), and their brood of four have spent most of the kids’ childhood as itinerant squatters, moving from one city to another anytime Rex loses his job or gets in trouble with the law or the family’s neighbors. They crisscross the country in a station wagon (later upgraded to a small cargo truck) with their belongings strapped to the top, the kids reading books for their only education. And they continually dream about the “glass castle” the family will build once they settle down, with everyone making requests for architectural features and Rex working on the blueprints at night.

The second eldest of Rex and Rose’s four kids (and Rex’s favorite) is Jeannette, whose story is told through two timelines that cut back and forth in the film. One timeline, set in 1989, stars Brie Larson as grown-up version of the character. Adult Jeannette is a cultured and cosmopolitan gossip columnist at New York magazine; she’s also engaged to a man named David ( Max Greenfield , providing most of the film’s comic relief) and navigating a difficult relationship with her parents, who are squatting in a building on the Lower East Side.

The other timeline moves through the family’s years of itinerant life up until they settle in Welch — against Rex’s wishes — shortly before Jeannette reaches her teens. There, they move into a rundown cabin with no electricity or running water that costs $50 a month, and the children’s rough but idyllic childhood slowly collapses into wreckage as Rex descends into alcoholism and Rose stands by, seemingly helpless. Jeannette (played as a child by the excellent Ella Anderson ) chafes the most against the family’s lifestyle, while still worshiping her father.

Her complicated feelings about Rex are the core of the story, and as The Glass Castle switches between Jeannette’s childhood and adulthood, we start to understand why her feelings surrounding her father are so complicated. Rex is like a larger-than-life outline, and an encounter with him at any point along either of the timelines leaves more questions than answers. Is he neglectful of his children, or is he teaching them to be strong? Is he loving toward his wife, or is he abusive? Is he intelligent and knowledgeable, or just a really good con artist?

Young Jeannette doesn’t have the maturity to really ponder these questions. She just idolizes her dad, even though she knows he also is very flawed. As she ages, though, these contradictions battle within her more and more, till she’s at a breaking point. It’s obvious that she’s made many of her life choices in response to her father’s way of living. But if she doesn’t fully understand her feelings about her father, how can she live with herself?

The Glass Castle sometimes seems willfully blind about its own story

Cutting back and forth between timelines can be tricky in films, because the resulting transitions sometimes feel too forced or jarring. But the approach mostly works in The Glass Castle , as guided by the sure hand of director  Destin Daniel Cretton ( Short Term 12 ), who also shares screenplay credits with Andrew Lanham .

Cretton clearly has a knack for working with actors. Harrelson is fantastic, as is the entire child cast. But Larson, strangely enough, never seems to find her way into her role, playing adult Jeannette with a kind of vagueness that makes some the character’s choices seem unmotivated. That may be the fault of the screenplay, which doesn’t quite fill out her character — she’s at the core of the story, but she seems somehow less than three-dimensional — and meanders to an end that feels unearned.

But it’s hard to argue with a story that draws on real life. These characters — as the home video that plays over the credits remind us — are real people, after all. And if Jeannette is her father’s daughter, it makes sense that her character doesn’t totally add up. Rex doesn’t really, either.

The problem is that, while watching the film, one gets the sense that events from Walls’s memoir have been compressed in a way that squeezes out some of the meaning-making details, details that help shape the story and give it purpose. That’s not unusual in movies based on real events, which struggle, like memoir, to isolate a “story” in the midst of someone’s entire life.

But as a result, The Glass Castle seems to be missing a sense of purpose. Is it a story about self-realization, or about feeling conflicted about a parent, or about how parents mess up their kids, or about realizing that your parents were right all along, or something else entirely?

The film seems to want to have it a few different ways, drawing on all of those emotional threads at once, and in the end they crash into one another in an unwieldy manner. For most of the movie’s runtime, it seems like a story about coming to grips with your complicated feelings about the past, but by the end, some of the complexity seems to have evaporated.

At times, it even feels a bit blind. Since memoir relies on an individual person’s memory — and memory fades and morphs over time — this may be inevitable. But it also means that The Glass Castle ’s view of Rex sometimes feels skewed. Viewed through one lens, Rex is a complicated and flawed but ultimately loving father. But viewed through another, he’s a controlling egomaniac with an abusive hold on his wife and children, and it can feel eerily like the movie (and its characters) are woefully oblivious to that.

How audiences react to Rex likely will depend on people’s individual experiences, which are impossible to control for. Jeannette Walls, at least in the film, remembers her father fondly, even through all the murk of the past. Those who can take her view of him will find The Glass Castle to be vibrant, interesting, moving, and maybe even cathartic.

The Glass Castle opens in theaters on August 11.

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Movie Review – The Glass Castle (2017)

October 3, 2017 by Freda Cooper

The Glass Castle , 2017.

Directed by Destin Daniel Crettin. Starring Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, Max Greenfield, Sarah Snook, Robin Bartlett, Ella Anderson, Sadie Sink, and Chandler Head.

A successful New York gossip columnist believes she has left her impoverished and difficult childhood behind her – until one night she encounters her now homeless father.  It brings back memories of her earlier years and raises the possibility of letting her parents back into her life.

Is The Glass Castle this year’s Captain Fantastic ?  Superficially, it could be seen that way.  Both have unconventional, unorthodox fathers bringing up a brood of children but, once you get past that, the similarities drop away.  Captain Fantastic showed an idealistic and intelligent father whose efforts at raising his children were unusual and sometimes misguided.  But there was never any doubt about his devotion to the children.  The father in The Glass Castle is a very different proposition.

The initial premise – the almost hippy-like parents moving from one state to another  – seems charming and, indeed, so does the father Rex (Woody Harrelson). It seems to be a great life for him, wife Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) and, most of all, their children.  One big adventure, right?  Wrong.  There are times when the kids go without food for days, they don’t go to school, because their father doesn’t hold with it and they have to witness his alcoholism, his outbursts of anger and the vicious arguments that go with it.  Jeannette (played as an adult by Brie Larson) nearly drowns thanks to her father’s brutal attempts to teach her to swim.  And they have no real stability in terms of a home – which is why the adult Jeannette’s belongings are still in boxes, even though she’s been living with her fiancée for months.

Yet Jeannette is a daddy’s girl.  She adores her father, so she’s the one who really buys into his dreams, including the Glass Castle of the title, and his constant promises of a better tomorrow.  A more charitable description is that they’re a distraction from poverty, but the truth is that he can’t distinguish dreams from reality and prefers to live in that comforting dream world.  All those promises never come to anything.  When he and the family move to a ramshackle house where he says he’s going to build the glass castle, he digs a deep pit at the front of the house, presumably for the foundations.  Except that it ends up being filled with rubbish.

The story, which revolves around Jeannette, is told in a series of flashbacks and flash forwards.  There’s a strong sense, though, that the scenes in the past could have been given less prominence, making way for more emphasis on her current life to show how her past had affected her.  As it stands, it makes for an unbalanced film and one that is a good half an hour too long.

Even more worrying is the descent into schmaltz in the second half, despite the father’s behaviour and the mother’s inability to intervene, apart from the occasional reproach from the side lines.  Admittedly, this is based on true story and the message is all about unconditional love.  But can the children be quite so forgiving?  The syrupy tone towards the end of the film is overpoweringly sickly, with Jeanette, her mother and her siblings all reminiscing about the father as if he were some kind of saint.  The damage he inflicted on them seems to have been forgotten and now he’s dear old dad.  It’s hard to believe that the film comes from director Destin Daniel Crettin, whose previous feature was Short Term 12 , which also starred a rising star called Brie Larson.

Some of the emotional honesty he showed in that wouldn’t have gone amiss here.  The film sorely needs it.  That’s not to say it’s unwatchable.  Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson – almost omnipresent on the big screen this year thanks to Wilson , War for the Planet of the Apes and the forthcoming Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – are both in fine form as father and grown up daughter and the younger children are impressive as well.  But it isn’t enough.  That mawkish ending means this is a film that’s not just inconsistent to the point of incomprehensible, but any emotional intelligence has gone straight out of the window and it really dodges the issue at its heart.  Not unconditional love, but the responsibility that goes with being a parent.

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Freda Cooper.  Follow me on Twitter , check out my movie blog and listen to my podcast, Talking Pictures .

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REVIEW: “The Glass Castle”

While walking out of my screening of “The Glass Castle” I immediately pulled out my phone and began perusing opinions on a certain red vegetable movie review aggregate (or fruit depending on your culinary or botanical lean). I had avoided reading reviews but knew reactions were all over the spectrum. Sure enough some have heralded it as “one of the best films of the year” while others have called it “unpleasant”, “lumbering”, “tiresome”, and so on.

So where do I land on “The Glass Castle”, a film based on Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about her nomadic childhood and the family dysfunction she endured. I never found it lumbering, tiresome, or even unpleasant outside of when it was meant to be. At the same time its inconsistencies and messiness keeps me from embracing it as one of the year’s best.

The movie is co-written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton whose previous film was the intimate and tightly-made “Short Term 12”. “The Glass Castle” is much more wide-open in its attempt at covering a lot of ground. It hops back-and-forth in time stopping at significant points in Walls’ childhood and mixing them in with her  story as a young adult out on her own.

Brie Larson plays the twenty-something Jeannette living in 1989 New York City. Her determined quest for independence took her away from her harsh family situation and she now writes for a newspaper and has a fiancé (Max Greenfield). But despite her new life, she can’t completely escape the scars from her past, and the internal connection to her family inspires a longing for the idyllic life she dreamed of as a child.

Woody Harrelson plays her father Rex, and through every time hop we see the same complex and deeply flawed man. Harrelson is given the bigger, louder role and his performance is spot-on. But it’s the movie’s depiction of Rex that’s problematic. There’s an effort to sell him as both a charming free spirit and a despicable father. The problem is most attempts at a positive reflection simply don’t work. In fact many of the tender moments are found in scenes where Rex is feeding his children’s imagination in order to hide their poverty and/or lawbreaking – situations he is responsible for.

To go further, the negative reflections of Rex are profoundly more prevalent and overpowering. I found it difficult to see him as anything other than a violent, abusive alcoholic and a generally repugnant human being. Naomi Watts plays Jeanette’s mother Rose Mary, and she just seems along for the ride. She does nothing to curb Rex’s behavior and at times is just as abusive and negligent as her husband. There are moments where Cretton creates some genuine sympathy for these two characters, but I found myself too turned off by their actions to be sympathetic. They are appalling individuals.

Here’s the thing, I’m fine with the movie presenting them this way especially if it’s key to the story being told. But the ending undercuts the rest of the film, and it asks too much of the audience. I won’t spoil anything, but it’s here that the film’s earlier attempts at creating a compassionate side of Rex simply don’t hold weight. If more time had been given to his complexity over his repugnance it could have worked. Instead we have an element of the story that feels short-changed and a final act that needed much more attention to be effective.

There is also a general problem with tone. At times it’s wildly inconsistent. Make no mistake, there are some very disturbing and effective scenes that deal with abuse. But there are also these jolts of humor, mostly involving the Rex character, that are hard to figure out. It works when portraying him as an eccentric, but not so much when the humor crosses over into the abusive scenes. At my screening I’m not sure the audience knew when to laugh. There were several instances where some people were laughing and others groaning in disgust all during the same scene.

“The Glass Castle” is a tough experience to define. It’s depiction of the dark side of Janet Walls’ painful childhood is clear-eyed, visceral and hard to watch. But it badly undersells a significant part of this profoundly penetrating true story. Larson and Harrelson are excellent and the movie’s boldness in tackling the subject matter is commendable. Despite the tonal shifts I was onboard for most of the way. But reconciling the bulk of the film with the tidy ending is something I still haven’t been able to do. I can’t help but believe the book offers up a better, more emotionally satisfying balance.

VERDICT – 2.5 STARS

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13 thoughts on “ review: “the glass castle” ”.

I read her memoir earlier this year and loved it. This film took everything gritty about that novel and made it shiny. It romanticized her experience and changed things just to make it more “empowering” and “feel good.” It basically did everything I was afraid it was going to do.

I see where you’re coming from. That element is certainly there. I haven’t read the book, but for me it didn’t romanticize her experience. I thought 95% of her childhood was depicted as horrific. That’s why I had such an issue with the ending. It asks way too much of us to buy into it after spending nearly two hours showing the hellish, abusive family life she endured.

I should have seen this earlier in the week but lately been having really a hard time getting motivated to write movie reviews! It’s the damndest thing. Put this one off, heard mixed things, now I’m even more likely to keep putting it off lol….

This is a tough one to come down on. Such a weird mix of good and bad. Ultimately I just couldn’t reconcile the bulk of the film with its ending. I would still say see it just to see where you end up with it. But I don’t think it will hurt to wait for DVD.

Yeah this curious mixture of flavors I must say is what is probably ultimately going to get me in a seat. Plus I am just the ultimate Woody Harrelson apologist

Well you won’t have to work hard to sell or defend Harrelson. He’s really, really good in this. He falls right into the role. If you’re that big of a fan you’ll definitely want to give it a watch.

I really like Brie Larson, but the trailer already bored me just a little. I think I should rather read the book and then decide haha.

Oh I do too. Love Larson. One of my new favorites. It’s funny, the trailer had me intrigued. I hadn’t heard of the book so I was really curious. But Larson (who is good in this) can’t save it from its bigger issues.

This movie certainly was uneven and a bit messy, for sure, but I was still left feeling incredibly moved by its story and performances. Great review, Keith!

The story is definitely powerful. I think the reality of it being a true story carried it a bit. It made the ending a bit more digestible. But movie-wise the finale was a struggle for me.

Sounds like a movie that will cause a diverse response in the audience.

It definitely has. I know it was a roller coaster ride for me.

I’ll keep my eye out for it.

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Review: Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson keep flawed 'Glass Castle' from completely breaking

The Glass Castle offers up a movie clan to beat in terms of complete dysfunction, though the brutal and heart-wrenching film is in its own way just as much of a mess.

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton ( Short Term 12 ), the family drama (** out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday) takes Jeannette Walls'  best-selling memoir about her tumultuous nomadic childhood to the big screen, but the adaptation is flawed in its execution, with frequent humorous moments failing to jibe with several instances of abuse and cruelty. Gripping performances from Brie Larson and Woody Harrelson, though, rise above the melodrama to craft the film’s best and most emotional sequences.

More: Brie Larson, aka Captain Marvel, has an adorable secret

Larson stars as the adult Jeannette in 1989 when she’s a successful New York City gossip columnist — and former USA TODAY reporter — who’s recently engaged to a financial adviser (Max Greenfield as the resident comic relief) yet is estranged from her homeless parents Rex (Harrelson) and Rose Mary (Naomi Watts), going so far as to ignore them when she sees them picking through trash on the streets of Manhattan.

It seems harsh until the flashbacks begin showing the travails Jeannette goes through as a young child (Chandler Head), preteen (Ella Anderson) and high schooler (Larson) as her family bounces from town to town, state to state, when bill collectors and/or the local cops come, usually for something their hard-drinking father has done. Mom and Dad try to pass their frustrating existence off as a grand adventure: One nugget from the pater familias goes, “You learn from living. Everything else is a damn lie.” But the truth is, theirs is not a good, safe home. At all.

Rex is a smart, loving dad wanting to teach his four children science and architecture when he’s sober, yet a mean, spiteful drunk who can’t rid himself of the bottle. And Rose Mary’s not much more of a model parent: A self-proclaimed artist, she can’t stop painting long enough to make her kids lunch, and when it’s apparent that they’re stuck in an untenable position living in squalor, Jeannette — the second-oldest child of the brood — makes a pact with her brother and sisters to be there for each other and escape when they’re old enough.

The neglect, violence and molestation will get one's blood boiling and are hard to watch in their rawness, yet tonal whiplash abounds when they’re followed or preceded by something more lighthearted. The movie also manages to wear out its welcome in terms of running time yet still short-shrift the feelings of Jeannette’s siblings, who each seem to have feelings about their unfortunate situation that are left unexplored in the end.

More: Brie Larson campaigns for a fight scene between Captain Marvel and The Hulk

It’s hard to imagine why a family could remain any sort of unit after what unfolds, though Larson and Harrelson’s scenes together at least give the movie the humanity it sorely needs — Harrelson especially is noteworthy in balancing fearful menace and tearful regret. As different as they seem, Jeannette and Rex are stubborn independent spirits of the same ilk who fight for what they believe and, at their core, they most believe in each other.

While the film at times shows cracks, the two actors, giving their own mini-masterclass, are the glue that keeps  Glass Castle ’s narrative from completely shattering.

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