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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.

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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’: 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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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

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'The Glass Castle' Review: Wild Childhood Makes for Tame Memoir

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.

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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 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

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The glass castle.

Common Sense Says
Parents Say 7 Reviews
Kids Say 4 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

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

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 14+?

A supporting character has a drinking problem; he appears staggering drunk and v

A child is burned with boiling water and goes to the hospital. Children are show

Somewhat infrequent uses of foul language, including one use of "f--k," "s--t,"

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

Any Positive Content?

Walls is portrayed as a survivor and a person with a positive outlook, despite g

The kind of upbringing portrayed in the movie is troubling; while the children d

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

Where to Watch

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Parent and Kid 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

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The Glass Castle (2017)

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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

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.

Woody Harrelson and Ella Anderson in The Glass Castle

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.

Max Greenfield and Brie Larson in The Glass Castle

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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DVD & Streaming

The Glass Castle

Content caution.

In Theaters

August 11, 2017
Brie Larson Jeannette Walls; Woody Harrelson as Rex Walls; Naomi Watts as Rose Mary Walls; Ella Anderson as Young Jeannette; Chandler Head as Youngest Jeannette; Max Greenfield as David; Josh Caras as Brian; Charlie Shotwell as Young Brian; Iain Armitage as Youngest Brian; Sarah Snook as Lori; Sadie Sink as Young Lori; Olivia Kate Rice as Youngest Lori; Brigette Lundy-Paine as Maureen; Shree Crooks as Young Maureen; Eden Grace Redfield as Youngest Maureen; Robin Bartlett as Erma; Joe Pingue as Uncle Stanley

Home Release Date

November 7, 2017
Destin Daniel Cretton

Distributor

Movie review.

“Rich city folks live in fancy apartments with their air so polluted they can’t even see the stars. We’d be out of our minds to trade places with any one of them.”

So Rex Walls tells his second oldest daughter, Jeannette, as they lie in a pile of snow, staring at the sky on a cold Christmas night. A night in which Christmas presents—as usual—are in short supply.

So Rex tells Jeanette to pick a star to claim for herself. She chooses the brightest object in the sky, Venus. Dad breaks the news: It’s not a star.

“I like it anyway,” Jeannette replies.

“What the h—,” Rex laughs. “It’s Christmas. You can have a planet if you want.”

Rex would indeed give his daughter the world if he could. But despite that bighearted affection, he can’t even give Jeannette—or her three siblings and their longsuffering mother, Rose Mary—basic necessities. Rex never lacks for cigarettes and booze. But his family almost always lacks for everything else: food. Running water. Electricity. Security.

The family’s vehicles—sometimes an ancient moving van, sometimes a station wagon—are as much home as any of the abandoned places they squat in. But those “homes” are rarely home for long. Rex’s taste for alcohol, paired with his easily provoked peevishness and total inability (and unwillingness) to pay his debts, means the Walls family never settles anywhere very long.

No matter, Rex rationalizes. “Family is where we are.”

When young Jeannette suggests that she and her siblings should be in school, Rex balks, steering the station wagon he’s driving across the desert and laughing as it bounds over ripples and rocks. “This is as real as it gets, kids,” he preaches. “You learn from living.”

Rose Mary, a painter, reinforces that lesson, spying an ancient, weather-beaten Joshua tree growing perpendicularly to the desert floor. “The wind’s been beating that tree down since the day it was born,” mom says. “But it refuses to fall. The struggle gives it its beauty.”

It’s an apt metaphor for the Walls’ life: tenacious, even thriving in its own strangely beautiful way. Yet clinging to life in an arid, desolate place nonetheless.

Jeannette and her siblings adore their dad. But as they get older, they’re see Rex for who he is: a proud, terrified, broken addict who will never be able to walk his outsized talk. That reality propels Jeannette, as an adult, toward a writing career in New York City, where she nurtures a lifestyle that’s the diametric opposite of the life she lived as a child.

But Jeanette can’t escape her roots, especially when the time comes to tell her parents that’s she’s decided to marry one of those rich city folks in a fancy apartment.

Positive Elements

Rex Walls is a tragically flawed father and husband. But despite those deficiencies, he still loves his family deeply.

Rex and Jeanette have a particularly close connection. When Dad comes home drunk with a bloody cut on his arm, Jeanette stitches him up, and they have poignant heart-to-heart conversation. “I swear,” Rex says, “There are times I think that you’re the only one around who still has any faith in me. You know I’d do anything for you. Anything.” Jeanette responds, “Do you think maybe you could stop drinking? It’s just—when you drink, you can’t take care of us.”

Rex does decide to quit, though he tasks his young daughter with keeping anyone from giving him a drink during his detox process. For days, he wails and carries on, his arms tied with cloth to a bed. When Rex emerges, he’s battled through his addiction, which leads to a brief-but-temporary sobriety stint.

The Glass Castle also shows how Jeanette assumes a motherly, caretaking role early in her life. Neither her drunken father nor her flighty mother is a consistently good parent, so Jeanette discharges those duties. She cooks (at one point catching her pajamas on fire and ending up hospitalized), strives to protect her siblings and takes care of both parents. Near the end of his life, Rex acknowledges the toll his addiction took on Jeanette: “No little girl should ever have to carry her daddy on her back.” Rex praises her for being “beautiful,” “smart” and “strong.” And he reveals a scrapbook he’s secretly kept: “It’s every story you’ve written since eighth grade,” he tells Jeanette, who’s now a magazine writer.

Though Jeanette does have a special bond with her father, as she grows in adolescence, she’s also aware of his failings and tries to help her siblings escape Rex’s controlling clutches.

Rose Mary, for her part, is depicted as being loyal to Rex to a fault. At one point, she comes close to summoning the willpower to leave Rex for her children’s sake. “We cannot live like this anymore,” she tells him. But she can’t bring herself to do it, even though she obviously sees how her husband’s behavior is hurting her children.

When adult Jeanette asks her mother why she doesn’t just leave him, Rose Mary confesses how Rex rescued her from an emotionally damaging family as well, something that earned her perpetual loyalty. Near the end of Rex’s life, Rose Mary encourages Jeanette to set aside her bitterness and visit her dad. “I know you love him, and I just think you’ll regret it if you don’t come home and say goodbye.”

Spiritual Elements

Rex’s belief system is perhaps revealed as he talks with Jeanette about what’s happening atop a flickering flame, at “the boundary between turbulence and order.” It’s a place where “no rules apply,” and there’s “no point in trying to find a reason or a pattern.” Elsewhere, Rex says he’d rather “be in hell with my back broke” than return to his “godforsaken” home town in West Virginia. While going through withdrawal from alcohol, he screams, “God help me!”

Early on, Rex coaches a frightened young Jeanette to face her fears, which he calls “demons.” Near the end, Rex revisits that philosophy on dealing with fear, telling adult Jeanette, “I spent my whole life running from those demons in the wild, and the entire time they were hiding inside my own belly.”

Sexual Content

Rex and Rose Mary embrace a couple of times … including one incident (where he climbs on top of her) following a terrible fight.

In her late teens, Jeanette somewhat unwittingly ends up with a young man in his apartment. His intent is clear, but Jeanette resists his forceful advances, saying she’s “not that kind of girl.” He throws her on a bed, kissing her and trying to remove her clothes. Jeanette manages to get out of the situation by offering to take off her dress herself. She begins to do so (we see her in a bra), but her horrible abdominal scars scare the man off—especially when Jeanette says, “It’s worse further down.”

Rex makes a double entendre quip about enjoying seeing his wife in “full exposure.” Jeanette and her rich fiancé, David, kiss. They’re shown in bed together (and they’re clearly cohabiting before getting married), but not sexually engaged.

There are multiple insinuations of incestuous sexual abuse (which I’ll talk more about Violent Content).

Violent Content

The Walls family eventually moves back to Welch, West Va., where Rex grew up. The children learn that his mother, Erma—whom they’ve never met—is a stern, violent woman who cows everyone around her with belligerent put-downs and physical intimidation. She’s quick to slap the children in the face if they misspeak. And instead of trying to curtail her physically abusive behavior, Rex tells his children that they must respect their grandmother.

The children spend a week with Erma. The girls find the woman apparently trying to unbutton the pants of Jeannette’s young brother, Brian. They jump on her and attack the elderly woman in response. Later they discover their dad’s old diaries, which imply that Erma sexually abused him as well.

As noted, Jeanette’s clothes catch on fire as she’s trying to cook hot dogs. Her entire torso is covered in flames, and Rose Mary throws a blanket on her and rolls her around on the floor to extinguish them. We later glimpse horrible, pus-filled scars underneath Jeanette’s bandages.

Jeanette stitches up a nasty cut on her dad’s arm. We don’t see most of the impromptu medical treatment, but we do hear Rex coaching her on how to push the needle through the skin.

Rex and Rose Mary have a fight (which we hear more than see) in which she ends up dangling out a window. (How she got there happens offscreen, but it’s implied that Rex probably pushed her.) Rex throws a chair through a window in anger. He puts a virtual stranger in a headlock. Rex clocks his future son-in-law squarely in the nose. Someone has a blood-soaked bandage around his head.

Crude or Profane Language

About 10 s-words. Fifteen misuses of God’s name, including about a dozen pairings with “d–n.” Jesus’ name is abused once, and we hear another “jeez.” “D–n,” “h—” and “a–” are each used about a dozen times. We hear two uses of “b–ch.” Rex calls his wife a “castrating whore.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

There’s rarely a scene in the film where Rex isn’t smoking or drinking. And Rex regularly spends the family’s grocery money on alcohol. When one of the Walls siblings asks what their father is dying of, Jeannette’s brother, Brian, says that his unnamed terminal condition is the result of “smoking four packs of cigarettes and drinking two quarts of booze every day for 50 years.”

Other scenes involve various adult characters consuming alcohol as well.

Other Negative Elements

Rex (and, by extension, Rose Mary) make plenty of questionable or downright immoral decisions. After Jeanette’s hospitalized for burns on her abdomen, Rex schemes how to spirit his daughter out of the hospital without paying. The plan involves Jeanette’s younger brother, Brian, pretending to have a screaming fit to distract doctors and nurses long enough for Rex to nab Jeanette. (It works.)

Elsewhere, Rex tries to “teach” Jeanette to swim by hurling her into the water. “If you don’t want to sink, you have to learn to swim,” he exhorts. “You can’t cling to the side your whole life.” The third time, Jeanette makes it to the surface alone. “You did it, baby!” he exclaims. “Don’t touch me,” Jeanette spits. “You tried to kill me.”

One of the Walls kids jokingly references a plumbing-free home that had a “yellow poop bucket.” There are references to Rex’s penchant for gambling. He steals the savings of one of his children.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Rose Mary comes to adult Jeanette and asks if she can borrow a million dollars to purchase her brother’s portion of an inheritance. It comes to light that Rose Mary also had been bequeathed a similarly valuable parcel of land when Jeanette was just 11. Jeanette is beyond furious at the discovery that a childhood mostly spent in terrible poverty could have been averted had her mother been willing to sell the land.

The Glass Castle , based on the real Jeanette Walls’ memoir of the same name, takes its name from one of Rex Walls’ unrealized dreams: building a solar-powered, window-filled home for his family. He’s got the plans. He even begins to dig a new foundation outside one dilapidated residence where the family lives for a time. But the glass castle is never constructed.

This film’s title reflects one of its main themes: the distance between our idealized hopes and our traumatic realities. For a long time, the Walls children believe their always-dreaming, always-scheming, always-big-talking father will make good on his lofty plans. Slowly, though, they realize that’s never going to happen. Instead, their drunken, dreamer dad is an utter failure when it comes to traditional fatherly duties such as providing and protecting.

But Rex, despite his failures (and his penchant for profanity, this film’s biggest content concern), loves his family. And Jeanette, despite her estranged disillusionment from her father as an adult, is eventually able to make peace with her turbulent upbringing—in all of its many disappointments.

“We never did build the glass castle,” Rex confesses in one of their final conversations. “No, but we had a good time planning it,” Jeanette graciously replies.

The story of Jeanette Walls’ family is an achingly poignant one, exposing deep imperfections amid remarkable beauty. It’s a story of navigating damaging family dysfunction while still realizing the profound dignity of even the most damaged family members. Ugliness and selfishness abound here. But then again, so do hope and courage.

Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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What Is Cinema?

The Glass Castle Review: An Adaptation That’s Not Nearly Shattering Enough

I went to The Glass Castle wanting to cry: for boring personal reasons I won’t go into here, for larger political/societal reasons we’re all too well aware of. And for the simple reason that it’s August and, with a few exceptions , we’ve had a long summer of hard, loud stuff that, while engaging, might not be exactly cathartic. The Glass Castle seemed, on paper, to be the perfect outlet for that release.

Based on former gossip reporter Jeannette Walls’s mega-best-seller memoir, The Glass Castle is a family saga about difficult parents and their put-upon kids, a slice of erratic Americana in which time passes and people grow and come to terms with things. That the film was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose sensitive 2013 drama Short Term 12 was an indie favorite that year, augured well. He could avoid the fat and cheese and get to the muscular center of this sprawling emotional story, a daughter (played as a grown-up by Short Term 12 star Brie Larson ) grappling with her erratic and abusive dad ( Woody Harrelson ) as she struggles to find her place in the world.

All the good crying material is there. But, alas, I left The Glass Castle almost entirely dry of eye. The film has moments of true bittersweet ache, especially when Larson is on screen. But much of it is clodding and simple, the worst kind of memoir adaptation, when true life—things that actually happened!—look like cliché. It’s dismaying how many dull and conventional tendencies Cretton reveals here—corny swells of music, stiff caricatures of both wealth and poverty. The film’s script, written by Cretton and Andrew Lanham (adapter of The Shack, which is about a shack), is full of nonsense like people saying “you’re the strongest person I know”—something we hear a lot in movies, but I’m not sure anyone has ever said in real life. Unless they were at a weight-lifting contest, maybe. The Glass Castle is bathed in the earnest, desperate glow of awards aspirations—curious, then, that it’s been released in the doldrums of August.

Perhaps there was some idea that this film could fill the so-called Help slot, a sappy movie version of a best-selling, female-skewing book that would be the antidote to months of stuff for the boys. I think The Glass Castle is a little less cynical than that—there are plenty of moments throughout when it seems that serious art was the filmmakers’ aim—but it still plays as awfully thirsty, with Harrelson’s showy and grating performance at the sweaty center. The Help at least has a winsome airiness to it. The Glass Castle is as heavy and thick and ultimately unwelcome as a bowl of stew served up on a hot summer day. It doesn’t taste terrible, but it’s all wrong for the season.

The film jags forward and backward in time. In the 1960s, young Jeannette and her family are vagabond renegades of a sort, tearing across picturesque swaths of America as they go from home to home, leaving whenever the bill collector or the lawman comes calling. At first, Harrelson’s Rex is framed as a mad, brilliant, hobo philosopher-poet, a man who can see through the fabric of ordered society and glimpse a better, purer life beyond it. Of course, we’ve seen this kind of guy on film before, so we know he’s mostly full of it. But the movie is slow in revealing just what it is that’s rotten at his core.

I’ve not read Walls’s book, but I’m sure it’s a more nuanced account of life with a difficult parent than we see in this movie. In Cretton’s pared-down version of events, the chief villain here is alcohol, which Rex consumes in reckless abundance. It’s odd, then, that the movie introduces his drinking as offhandedly as it does. Of course, there’s an argument to be made for subtle reveals. But that Rex was a bitter, nasty, cruel drunk is crucial information that’s too casually meted out in the film, ceding prominence in a way that feels evasive. By the end of the film, Jeannette’s conflict with her father seems not that he was a monstrously abusive alcoholic, but that they had a difference of ideology. The true darkness of this story is never confronted, all so there can be a sentimental softness, a roundness, at the close. It’s a rather ugly bit of downplaying.

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In the 1980s, when Jeannette is an adult and engaged to an uptight finance guy ( Max Greenfield, imported from another movie), her parents are living essentially in homeless squalor in New York City. They’ve followed their daughter there, though the reasons for that are never articulated in a satisfying way. Still, these sections of the film have a more interesting texture than the stuff in the 1960s, because Jeannette has steeled herself against her dad’s dangerous dynamism by then, and can finally question the premises of her childhood, and of the film. Larson is gently commanding in these scenes, giving Jeannette a weathered, sad, wise-beyond-her-years intelligence that’s a good balance to Harrelson’s histrionics. If only the film focused more on this narrative—the adults trying to figure out what they all mean to each other now that everyone’s drifted apart—rather than taking us on the rote, episodic, oddly abuse-forgiving tour of Jeannette’s patchwork youth.

A life contains a lot of stories, and a successful film about a life carefully chooses which ones to tell and in what proportions. Cretton fumbles at that calculus. The Glass Castle is a slapdash construction, all shards crudely fused together. I haven’t yet mentioned that Naomi Watts is in the movie, playing Jeannette’s long-suffering, long-enabling mother, Rose. Perhaps that’s because the movie almost forgets she exists. There’s a fascinating dimension to explore, a woman who’s both victim and agent of abuse, who stands by her man even as he leads her and her children into catastrophe after catastrophe. But The Glass Castle just trots her out when Jeannette needs a sounding board, or Rex needs somebody to whale on. In that way, the movie falls prey to Rex’s bad spell, too. It thinks he’s the interesting one, when in fact all his indulgent, destructive operatics, his entropic undertow, is pretty boring. It’s a grim kind of irony that The Glass Castle kinda lets Rex win in the end—and, yet again, bring the whole family down with him.

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Movie Reviews

'the glass castle' nearly shatters under the weight of its metaphors.

Scott Tobias

Brie Larson as Jeannette Walls, a young woman who carved out a successful life on her own terms. Jake Giles Netter/Lionsgate hide caption

Brie Larson as Jeannette Walls, a young woman who carved out a successful life on her own terms.

Based on Jeannette Walls' memoir, The Glass Castle refers to the fanciful home an impoverished father intends for his family, one with glass walls that welcome natural light during the day and, at night, become a window to the stars. The structure never gets built, but it's the Burj Khalifa of metaphors, a symbol of big dreams and broken promises that rises majestically to the heavens. At one point in Destin Daniel Cretton's leaden adaptation, a young Walls and her three siblings help their father actually dig the foundation. Later, the foundation is filled with garbage. The foundation is their relationship.

As the unifying idea for a memoir, the glass castle has a certain elegance, because the broad truth of it is supported by specific memories that bring depth and dimensionality to the Walls family. But in the journey from page to screen, it's merely the largest in a series of metaphors that have the effect of spoon-feeding insights rather than evoking them. It's one thing for a father to hand his daughter a knife to "fight demons," but another for him to specify that they're inner demons. Cretton falls in love with these writerly totems of turmoil and dysfunction, which have the effect of tidying up the tortured, contradictory emotions that define the bond between father and daughter.

Much like Cretton's affecting indie drama Short Term 12 , about the counselors and residents at a facility for at-risk teenagers, The Glass Castle concerns the bonds forged by children under psychological duress. Brie Larson's current ascendence owes much to her performance in the earlier film, and she returns to a similar role as a young adult who masks a secret pain rooted in childhood. As Jeannette, Larson first appears like a cartoon of Reagan-era upward mobility, with an impeccably coiffed updo, pearl earrings and necklaces, and a Wall Street slickster (Max Greenfield) on her arm. Yet the look of a child swimming in adult clothing seems right for Jeannette, who's running so far from her past that she's forgotten who she is and what she wants.

The Glass Castle toggles back and forth between 1989, when Jeannette is logging time as a gossip columnist for New York magazine, and her girlhood and adolescence, when she was living hand-to-mouth in a semi-nomadic family of societal dropouts. With her alcoholic father Rex (Woody Harrelson) unable to hold down a job and her mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) lost in her paintings, Jeannette and her siblings are treated like furniture, tossed in the back of a moving truck whenever their parents need to skip an eviction notice. They eventually settle in the town of Welch, W.Va., but "settle" is a relative term in a home without electricity or running water, and the domestic chaos caused by Rex's flights of fancy and emotional and physical abuse. Jeannette's solution is to take matters into her own hands and work to break the cycle of poverty and violence that grips her family.

The dynamic at play in The Glass Castle resembles films like The Mosquito Coast or Captain Fantastic , where children are held captive to the fanatical ideals of fathers who reject the civilized world. Yet Rex is more troubled than those others, because he lacks the discipline to provide for his family's most basic needs; when his children complain about not eating for three days, he strikes out with their available cash and returns home drunk and empty-handed 10 hours later. Jeannette's enduring faith in him to turn things around, answered by constant disappointment, is a solid emotional core for Cretton to build around.

Though the multiple actresses playing Jeannette limit the impact of Larson's performance — and its believability, too, when she plays her as a conspicuously old-looking teenager—she and Harrelson share the convincing shorthand of people who know best how to hurt each other. In its most affecting moments, The Glass Castle recalls Short Term 12 in bridging the traumas that connect children with their guardians and that all of them struggle to transcend. Jeannette forgives the unforgivable because she knows her father's past and clings to the hope that both of them can find their way to the other side.

Yet Cretton ultimately doesn't trust these observations to speak for themselves, so he lays it on thick with the metaphors, with the prodding score, and with an '80s setting that has the punishing airlessness of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. From the title down, it arrives prepackaged and closed to interpretation, which doesn't do justice to lives defined by instability and a legacy of abuse that spans at least three generations. Such a clean break from the past seems impossible.

Correction Aug. 11, 2017

A previous version of this review misspelled the name of the West Virginia town where the Walls family lived. It is Welch, W.Va., not Welsh, W.Va.

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(L-r) Max Greenfield as David, Brie Larson as Jeannette Walls and Woody Harrelson as Rex Walls in "The Glass Castle."

The movie begins in 1989, with Jeannette working as a gossip columnist for New York Magazine. Perfectly coifed and perpetually in pumps, she’s the 1980s ideal of the female professional who has it all, right down to her Wall Street fiance (Max Greenfield). One night, sitting in the back seat of a taxi on her way home from a fancy dinner, she notices a woman rummaging through garbage cans. Just then, a man emerges from the shadows and starts yelling at her driver. These two, we learn, are her mother and father — now squatters living on the Lower East Side. Although she still keeps in touch with them, Jeannette isn’t entirely sure that she wants to.

Crosscutting between scenes set in the present day and flashbacks to Jeannette’s childhood, the movie shows us what looks, at first blush, like a romantic adventure. Jeanette and her three siblings are home-schooled, because, as their father, Rex (Woody Harrelson), declares, “You learn by living.” The family is constantly on the move, piling into a station wagon and heading, seemingly, wherever the wind takes them. At one point, Rex pulls off a desert road and the kids’ artist mother (Naomi Watts) spots a Joshua tree that she feels a deep need to paint.

Get comfortable, Rex tells the kids — we’ll be sleeping here tonight.

Ella Anderson, who plays the 10-year-old Jeannette, does a lovely job portraying a starry-eyed daughter who idolizes her father. And Rex’s appeal is clear: He’s a charismatic dreamer with a brilliant streak. (The film’s title refers to his pipe dream of building an all-glass mansion for the family to live in.) He seems to know a little bit about everything, including all the ways that “the system,” as he calls it, has worked against his family.

Slowly, though, it becomes clear that he’s also a cruel and abusive drunk whose idea of teaching his daughter how to swim is throwing her in the deep end — again and again. The real reason he keeps uprooting the family is that he can’t hold down a job, and he has been avoiding bill collectors.

Inevitably, Jeannette begins to notice, as children will, that the cracks in the facade have become crevasses. Her transformation provides the movie’s most poignant turn of events, despite — or perhaps because — of the fact that it’s conveyed more subtly than the drama’s big emotional set pieces. Eventually, her growing awareness hardens into bitterness, which is how Jeanette ends up in Manhattan looking like Career Girl Barbie.

The movie’s past and present narratives are like two trains running in opposite directions. As a child, Jeannette comes to realize that her father isn’t a god. The question is: Will she come to understand, as an adult, that he’s also not a monster?

Any coming-of-age movie set in such a dysfunctional environment is going to have its tearjerking moments. And director Destin Daniel Cretton (who previously worked with Larson on “Short Term 12”) knows how to deploy slow-motion and piano for maximum sentiment. But the movie often undercuts itself by spelling things out rather than hinting at them, belaboring emotions and ideas to ensure that the audience understands what the characters are feeling and thinking.

Still, the movie may hit home for anyone who has ever wondered how much of our identity is shaped by nature vs. nurture. It’s Jeannette’s past that she’s running from. Yet no matter where she goes in her effort to transform herself, you can’t ever really outrun your parents, as Jeannette learns, because you can’t outrun yourself.

“The Glass Castle”

Two and one-half stars.

Rated PG-13.

127 minutes.

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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.

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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.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors, there are people like me: jeannette walls on "the glass castle".

As a fearsome Manhattan-based gossip columnist for two decades starting in the late ‘80s, Jeannette Walls used to make a living off of the tumultuous lives of the rich and famous—or, as her late father called them, “the skinny dames and the fat cats”—while writing for New York and Esquire magazine as well as MSNBC.com . The Barnard grad and her entrepreneur first husband seemingly fit right in among the other well-off residents of posh Park Avenue.

But in 2005, Walls decided to come clean about her own hardscrabble Appalachian past that she had mostly kept under wraps by publishing a memoir, “ The Glass Castle .” She and her three siblings were regularly uprooted based on the whims of their bohemian parents, Rex and Rose Mary, who rarely worked and were constantly on the run, racking up 27 addresses just in their first five years of marriage. He struggled with demons brought on by alcoholism while she put her ambitions as a painter above the needs of her children. And both were most likely bipolar. Homelessness, poverty and often hunger were constants in Walls’ childhood, even after they moved into a three-room hovel with no running water, hardly any heat, a surplus of vermin and a lack of electricity in her father’s hometown of Welch, a downtrodden West Virginia mining community.

After her autobiography—whose title refers to the solar-powered window-filled house that her father was constantly designing and vowed to build—became an immediate hit, one that was translated into 31 languages and spent seven years on the New York Times best-seller list, Walls, 57, gave up her big-city existence for a 205-acre farm in Culpeper, Va., with her second husband, fellow journalist and author John Taylor . Her mother, 83, resides in a cluttered cottage on the property while her precious art is stored in a shed. Now Walls and her life story will reach an even larger audience as the long-in-the-making movie adaptation of her memoir opens in theaters this week. She sat down in Washington, D.C., with RogerEbert.com to discuss her days as a disher of celebrity dirt, how it feels to have an Oscar winner like Brie Larson play her adult self and why so many continue to be drawn to her colorful account of her unusual past.

I remember meeting you in USA TODAY’s New York bureau in the ‘90s when you briefly were an assistant to financial columnist Dan Dorfman and thinking, “Wow, she is so regal and beautiful.” Journalists aren’t that pulled together usually. Little did I know what your life had been like before.

I worked so hard on that façade, honey. It’s funny because I found out some people thought I was aloof and kind of stuck up, because I was so reserved.

But you had a lovely smile, as I recall.

I thought I was friendly but I mostly kept to myself.

You must have had dealings with Donald Trump when you were writing the "Intelligencer" gossip column for New York magazine.

Oh, yeah. He and I talked kind of frequently. And I was not at all surprised at his election. Whether you love the man or hate him, he understands the media and understands the power of it. And as soon as the Internet hit and people started having their own web sites, I realized that people who did what I did, our positions were being threatened because, as journalists, we were the conduits between the celebrities and the public. They needed us. And as soon as they could have their own platforms—they used to say the freedom of the press belongs to those who own one—as soon as they had their own web sites, I saw pretty quickly my beat is going to be gone. It’s not extinct but it is going to have to morph into something else. Then TMZ and all that came up. Yeah, Donald Trump really understood how to float a story, how to float a rumor, how to manipulate the truth. And I think he was kind of shocked by how easy it was to plant stories. My father was slightly obsessed with him. “Give me dirt on Trump. You got to go after him, hon.”

For all the terrible situations you had to deal with because of your parents, they did seem to instill in you and your siblings an appreciation of the arts and sparked your imaginations. Your Dad was a thinker. They gave you a notebook so you could write stories. He made that comment to you: “Be careful what you do with that. You could change the world.”

That was quintessential Dad. These gestures that you could take as either Dad with his B.S. or you could take as this incredible belief in me. I chose to believe in his mythologies about me. And, yeah, I thought when he wasn’t being a no-account shiftless drunk he could be very inspiring and beautiful. And I will always love him and I will always miss him. Seeing Woody Harrelson ’s portrayal of him kind of blew me away because he so captured him. It wasn’t just the imagination. It was also the love of education, the love of learning even though we didn’t always go to a conventional school. It was constantly reading books and, going over the plans for the glass castle, we discussed the math. My brother, Brian, retired from the police force, became a teacher for a while and now he works for Habitat for Humanity. He said it made him appreciate Mom and Dad more because some of those kids in the rough area where he taught didn’t have someone to challenge them to be more than they were. And to believe in you. With a complicated childhood, you can either focus on the positive or the negative, and I chose to focus on the positive.

It’s amazing how many people have been touched by this book—about five million copies have been sold according to the film’s production notes.

It’s five million at least in the U.S. It is hard to gauge overseas. Honestly, I expected it to tank. I did not expect this to happen.

What do readers say when they meet you or write to you? I’m sure many of them have shared what moved them about your story.

It’s one of two things. “I have no idea people live like this. You really opened my eyes.” That is from one side of the tracks. On the other side: “You practically told my story.” There are a lot of people out there like me. And they will tell you the details. Like, they got burned making oatmeal for themselves. [Note: A scene early on shows a three-year-old Walls getting seriously burned when her mother told her to boil hot dogs herself.] Or driving around in a beat-up car and the father is a drunk. And, if you made it out, then maybe I can, too. It’s both sides. The revelation that there are people out there like that. And the revelation that there are people like me.

Growing up, you probably didn’t watch TV or go to the movies much.

No. We went to movies sometimes, like drive-in movies. We went to the quarter movies. But we didn’t have a television. I remember, one day of the week, all the kids at school would be discussing this amazing TV show called “The Brady Bunch.” I thought they must be like the Joads from “ The Grapes of Wrath .” “Oh, could you believe how they solved that problem, it was so amazing.” For years and years, “The Brady Bunch” just seemed like this mysterious larger-than- life family. Finally, when I moved to New York, I rented it. And it was kind of bewildering. When I started working at New York magazine, I didn’t know who all these celebrities were. I had been living in New York for a couple of years already. I moved there in 1977. I read newspapers enough to have a basic idea of who these people were. But for MSNBC, where I had to know the celebrities inside out, I took three weeks and I just studied People magazine. It was kind of shocking because sometimes the cameraman knew more about these people. It’s kind of weird the levels to which these people are followed. That they are almost deified. They know their children’s names and every relationship they’ve had. I was less interested with the celebrity stuff and who’s dating whom and more interested in celebrity temper tantrums and stuff like that. They are entitled to date whoever they want. But when they start abusing their staff, that is the thing that made me crazed.

When you did see movies more, what did you like?

I loved “ The Verdict .” I loved “ Casablanca .” You know, right vs. wrong. I think I like a movie where there is a victory, right over wrong, but there’s always some price to be paid.

You said in your piece that you wrote for the Los Angeles Times , about your experience with having your book turned into a movie, that you were warned by other writers about what happened to their works when they were adapted. What was the worst thing that you heard?

I don’t have permission to repeat any of their stories. But someone sent me a quote from John Le Carre , who said, “Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.” And Frank McCourt wrote a lovely, lovely book, Angela’s Ashes , but he was very unhappy with the movie version. It wasn’t because it was Hollywood-ized. Maybe it should have been more Hollywood-ized. I think it is very hard when you take these complicated books and it’s turned into something that is unrecognizable to you. I think Jodi Picoult wasn’t happy with the ending of “My Sister’s Keeper.”

At first, Paramount bought the rights to your book in 2005 and Brad Pitt ’s production company Plan B wanted to make it.

My understanding of what happened, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were still married when they got it. And Jennifer Aniston was the one who loved the book. When they split, it got orphaned a little bit.

So their break-up actually affected the fate of your book as a movie?

I could have gotten back at them in my column. Made them sorry. But it did put me in a bit of a pickle. They did do stuff with it. Some very talented screenwriters looked at it. They tried some scripts with it. But it’s a fine line, humor and pain and all the things in my family. It’s a delicate balance. And they were really grappling with “How do we do this?” Then, about five years ago, the producer Gil Netter just snatched it up—he made " Life of Pi ” and ‘”The Blind Side”—and his sensibilities are so like mine. Since he has done movies based on books, I figured he would know how to do it. He just wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Having Brie Larson play you as an adult probably is a dream come true.

She is an amazing human being. So empathetic. So perceptive. Talking to her is a little bizarre, because she sees everything. To be honest, she is really compassionate.

Destin Daniel Cretton , who directed and co-wrote the script for “The Glass Castle,” seems like a very good fit considering how he sensitively he handled the at-risk teens in the group home in “ Short Term 12 .” He portrayed them as human beings first, not victims or troublemakers.

My older sister, Lori, was really nervous about our book being made into a movie. She saw “Short Term 12” and said, “Our story is in good hands.”

She also got to check out Brie, since that was her breakout movie. The cast—Woody as your father, Naomi Watts as your mother—is quite strong. Then there is Ella Anderson , who plays you at age nine or so. She is amazing.

Oh my gosh. She took my breath away.

The most difficult scene to watch was the one in the public pool, where Woody as your Dad keeps throwing Ella into the deep end and forces her to learn how to swim.

It’s a great scene. I thought I was played perfectly. It really bothered a lot of people but some said they really admired him. That really was quintessential Dad. Sink or swim. These hard lessons.

Then again, one moment he is insisting his young daughter to do something against her will in front of pool filled with strangers. The next minute, he is taking the person in charge to task for segregating the black swimmers and only allowing them access during off hours.

That is how Dad was. You hated him one second, and then admired him like hell.

It gives the film extra depth to have two sets of young actors playing you and your siblings as you all grew up. But that can put extra strain on the director, dealing with so many less-experienced performers.

It was a challenge. But Destin was so great. He took the kids to Expos games. They all went to the park together and there was this incredible family feeling. There were kids skipping around on the sound stage, saying, “I love it here. I want to live here for the rest of my life.”

I saw an ad for the film on TV and there you were, onscreen, talking about the film and giving it your blessing. That doesn’t often happen with biopics and says a lot about how Lionsgate respects you and your story.

I didn’t know about that, either. Yesterday, I was working out at the gym and I heard my voice and thought, “What?”

They shot a lot of the film in Montreal. But did they go to Welch, too?

They did. They shot some scenes there. Destin wanted to go there to see it and get the feel of it. And he is walking down the street and he sees a sign that says, Welch Daily News . And that is where I laid out the high-school newspaper. He just knocks on the door and walks in. Suddenly, he makes friends with the editor and they show him around. And there is this 50-year-old or however old printing press down there. And it’s going “chunka, chunka, chunka.” He said, “Can I shoot a scene here?” He made friends with the mayor and got the local high-school football team to re-create a game. The cheerleaders, too. But the school’s colors were no longer maroon and white. They borrowed uniforms and the cheerleaders actually made their own for that. Destin said he wanted to shoot that scene in Welch because in the background there were these incredible mountains. They were majestic but they pin you in.

It seemed like they asked you for input. Even the costumer used an outfit you kept from the 1980s. That white power suit or whatever that was.

They were asking all this stuff. I told the set people, “I used my Rolodex’” and they said, “Your what?”

What do you think your Dad, who died in 1994, would have thought of this movie?

I don’t know. I think he would be bursting with pride. I think he would be grinning from ear to ear. I talked to my brother about this and Brian is really smart about him. He said, “Jeanette, curse him or bless him, he didn’t care as long as you say his name.” I think it was a respectful depiction of him. It definitely didn’t gloss over the ugliness. People who are addicted, you believe in them and then they break your heart. And I don’t blame Dad. And I don’t think Woody did, either. I think Woody got him.

Did Naomi do right by your Mom?

She was phenomenal. She captured this really complicated, contradictory woman. She doesn’t fall easily in any category.

I understood your Dad’s behavior more than your Mom’s. Maternal instincts usually are overpowering and take over your priorities.

For most people, they are. But Mom didn’t have that problem. Artists tend to understand Mom. People who feel "art is going save my life."

Did she ever sell a painting?

As a matter of fact, those are her paintings in the movie. A producer bought one. And he decided he wanted to buy another—and she raised the price. She said, “There’s a great demand for them lately.”

Susan Wloszczyna

Susan Wloszczyna spent much of her nearly thirty years at USA TODAY as a senior entertainment reporter. Now unchained from the grind of daily journalism, she is ready to view the world of movies with fresh eyes.

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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’ Review: Legendary Memoir Gets the Mediocre-Movie Treatment

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Based on an unsparing, unprettified 2005 family memoir by former gossip columnist Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle arrives on the big screen slicked up and eager to sooth when it should be ready to rumble. Walls pulled no punches on the page, using her own childhood to build a microcosm of poverty in America and what it does to children. She and her three siblings had to shit in a bucket and get by without heat, electricity and plumbing. The family lived off the grid as squatters, before settling awhile in Appalachia; the kids were at the mercy of a mentally unstable mother, who worked on her paintings while her kids starved. And then there was Walls’ alcoholic dreamer of a father, who spent most of his time between boozing binges running from the law and bill collectors.

The film version is directed with off-putting artificiality by Destin Daniel Cretton, who wrote the by-the-numbers script with Andrew Lanham. Oscar winner Brie Larson plays the adult Jeannette – and it’s through her perspective as a New York columnist/New York success story that we view the horrorshow of her past. The director meshed superbly with Larson in 2013’s Short Term 12, drawn from his own experiences working with troubled teens. That film scarcely rang a false note. This one is full to bursting with them.

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The actors do what they can against impossible odds. Naomi Watts plays the mother, Mary Rose, with a flighty, distracted air that doesn’t excuse a rampant neglect. She can’t be bothered to cook dinner for her kids because she has to heed the call of her muse; we then watch as a kitchen fire engulfs Jeannette, leaving her with third degree burns on her torso. Woody Harrelson brings a full arsenal of personal charisma to Rex, the father who promises Jeannette that one day he will build her a glass castle. The fact that he doesn’t keep this promise – or most others – is not supposed to matter; he’s taught his daughter to dream big. What Walls made flesh-and-blood in the book comes off on film as a barely-sketched outline, one that oddly distances us from the story instead of pulling us in.

The most moving performance comes from Ella Anderson, who plays Jeannette from roughly nine to 13. Her expressive eyes show us the toll hardship and carelessness take on a child – no matter how much she later makes of herself in the adult world, a well-paid magazine writer and engaged to an investment banker (Max Greenfield) and able to look away when she spots her mother dumpster diving in New York. Cretton’s film is too manicured and tonally modulated to let us into the anger and gutting guilt roiling inside Jeannette. The film keeps selling easy uplift – even in a coda featuring Walls and her real parents – when it most needs to generate raw emotion and blunt truth. Hollywood has a knack for sanitizing books that deserve better. In the case of The Glass Castle , it’s a damn shame.

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COMMENTS

The Glass Castle movie review (2017)
The Glass Castle. "The Glass Castle" is at odds with itself. Maybe that contradiction is by design. Maybe it's inevitable, given the emotionally complicated terrain it treads. But the result is a film that never quite clicks tonally and doesn't do justice to its harrowing central story. The film is based on the bestselling memoir of the ...
The Glass Castle (2017)
Rated: 2/4 Mar 22, 2022 Full Review Anni Glissman Mediaversity Reviews Despite addiction being one of the main themes of the film, The Glass Castle fails to adequately address the issue.
Review: Woody Harrelson as a Wild and Crazy Dad in 'The Glass Castle
2h 7m. 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 ...
Review: 'The Glass Castle' is an unconventional-family tale with heart
Review: 'The Glass Castle' is an unconventional-family tale with heart and a strong performance by Woody Harrelson By Kenneth Turan Aug. 10, 2017 12 PM PT
'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. The ties that bind ...
The Glass Castle (2017)
The Glass Castle: Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. With Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, Ella Anderson. A young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of nonconformist nomads with a mother who's an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father who would stir the children's imagination with hope as a distraction to their poverty.
Film Review: 'The Glass Castle'
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
The Glass Castle
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 Mae Abdulbaki Movies with Mae
The Glass Castle Movie Review
Our review: Parents say ( 7 ): Kids say ( 4 ): 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 ...
The Glass Castle (2017)
Jeannette's an excellent writer. This complicated, emotionally draining film owes much of its high effectiveness to the fact that it is a true story, proving that fiction cannot compete with the harrowing reality of well rendered truth. An indie beauty: powerful acting with a dysfunctional family.
The Glass Castle
TheWrap. Aug 6, 2017. In Cretton's hands, this fact-based tale of an oddball, destitute upbringing rings false. It's based on a woman's complicated personal recollections of her traumatic childhood, and yet it feels like a cloying, one-note Hollywood tale, the beastly trauma all tied up with a pretty bow and de-fanged.
The Glass Castle (2017 film)
The Glass Castle is a 2017 American biographical drama film directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and written by Cretton, Andrew Lanham, and Marti Noxon.It is based on Jeannette Walls' 2005 best-selling memoir of the same name.Depicting Walls' childhood, where her family lived in poverty and sometimes as squatters, the film stars Brie Larson as Walls, with Naomi Watts, Woody Harrelson, Max ...
The Glass Castle turns a best-selling memoir into a moving but flawed film
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 ...
The Glass Castle
The Walls family eventually moves back to Welch, West Va., where Rex grew up. The children learn that his mother, Erma—whom they've never met—is a stern, violent woman who cows everyone around her with belligerent put-downs and physical intimidation. She's quick to slap the children in the face if they misspeak.
The Glass Castle (2017) Movie Review
Terms and Imprint. A young girl is raised in a dysfunctional family constantly on the run from the FBI. Living in poverty, she comes of age guided by her drunkard, ingenious father who distracts her with magical stories to keep her mind off the family's dire state, and her selfish, nonconformist mother who has no intention of raising a family ...
The Glass Castle Review: An Adaptation That's Not Nearly Shattering En
The Glass Castle is a slapdash construction, all shards crudely fused together. I haven't yet mentioned that Naomi Watts is in the movie, playing Jeannette's long-suffering, long-enabling ...
'The Glass Castle' Nearly Shatters Under The Weight Of Its Metaphors
The Glass Castle toggles back and forth between 1989, when Jeannette is logging time as a gossip columnist for New York magazine, and her girlhood and adolescence, when she was living hand-to ...
A freewheeling childhood, in "The Glass Castle," is both dream and
The journalist wrote about her unorthodox upbringing, which left her scarred, both literally and figuratively, in her 2005 memoir "The Glass Castle," which is now a film starring Oscar-winner Brie ...
Review: Larson, Harrelson keep flawed 'Glass Castle' from 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.
There Are People Like Me: Jeannette Walls on "The Glass Castle"
Tweet. As a fearsome Manhattan-based gossip columnist for two decades starting in the late '80s, Jeannette Walls used to make a living off of the tumultuous lives of the rich and famous—or, as her late father called them, "the skinny dames and the fat cats"—while writing for New York and Esquire magazine as well as MSNBC.com .
The Glass Castle Review
The Glass Castle Review. Reviews. ... 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 ...
Peter Travers: 'The Glass Castle' Doesn't Do Memoir Justice
Adaptation of journalist Jeanette Walls' devastating rough-childhood book peddles easy uplift instead of cold, hard truths. By Peter Travers. August 10, 2017. 'The Glass Castle' uses an all-star ...
The Glass Castle
The Glass Castle was positively reviewed by The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, among others. [10] [11] [8] However, several school districts have found the book's inclusion in syllabi to be controversial.[12]In The New York Times Book Review, critic and novelist Francine Prose wrote, "The autobiographer is faced with the daunting ...

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

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

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

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The Glass Castle (2017)