Review of The Glass Castle (2017) by Matt C — 30 Aug 2017

From the very first moment that I heard of The Glass Castle, I immediately thought of last year's Captain Fantastic. With similar father figure characters, release strategies, indie-centric quirks as highlighted in their trailers, and themes, this seemed to be a repeat of the aforementioned Viggo Mortensen-starrer, which was actually pretty good.

And while this comparison has been stated to death, I have to say that The Glass Castle wouldn't have worked regardless of any similar movies in recent months. This is exactly what I feared it would be: an uneven, tonally troublesome treatment of heavy material with Brie Larson carrying the entire movie on her shoulders.

Even if it does have its moments, it's because of the actors, but they can't redeem the movie of a messy, messy script. Based on Jeanette Walls's memoir of the same name, the film follows her (here played by Larson) as an adult in then-present 1989 New York City.

Far away as possible from her poverty-stricken childhood, she happens across her alcoholic father Rex (Woody Harrelson) and artist mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts), still aimless drifters and living on the streets.

The film switches back and forth between her formative years and now. In the former, her parents drag her and her siblings around the country in order to evade law enforcement and distract from their hopelessly barren lives.

In the latter, Jeanette is a writer for the New York Magazine and lives with her fiancé David (Max Greenfield). The inherent trickiness of covering material like this is restricted to few, but I figured that the writer/director of Short Term 12 would be up to the task.

Destin Daniel Cretton seems to be really out of his depth here, as does his co-writers Andrew Lanhan and Marti Noxon. A drama heavily involving child abuse and neglect and featuring a scene of child molestation should be air-tight tonally, but The Glass Castle is anything but.

As if it's afraid to commit to the darkness of its source material, it time and time again falls back on quirky treatment of the content and misplaced humor, sometimes within the same scene. The constant clashing of emotions cheapens the impact of inherently disturbing behavior, almost all of which is detrimental to others.

Despite this, The Glass Castle, like the alcoholic patriarch in the picture, refuses to even flirt with any sense of solidarity, drifting back and forth in self-destructive ways. The structure of the film is also quite uneven, with the flashbacks cannibalizing the current-day scenes and rendering such organization moot both in buildup and end result.

In turn, this makes the film feel far longer than justified. At 127 minutes, it lacks enough singularity-and of course the adequate authenticity-and the second half drags substantially. As a whole, The Glass Castle is actually pretty boring movie.

With such integral pieces of the movie almost always on the verge of collapsing, it's up to the actors to hold it all up, and they do fine jobs. Larson, of course, does good work, even if Cretton's direction seems to be stifling her talents a bit at times.

Harrelson lends considerably more humanity to his character than is on the page, and the several supporting players are also solid. Naomi Watts does what she can to bring to life a hippie-dippy archetype, but in all honesty, there isn't much to do in her spot.

The funny thing about families is that despite their dysfunction, they-more often than not-learn something from each other in the process of their interactions. What not to do, who not to become, and what values to gravitate towards are lessons learned through a form of domestic osmosis.

With what the children in The Glass Castle have gone through, their end results don't seem realistic, and when a story is nonfiction and it still seems like a stretch, a storyteller's job has not been accomplished, no matter how many metaphors and musical cues they include.

4.4/10, lame, C-, below average, etc.