The Glass Castle

[Dropcap]D[/dropcap]estin Daniel Cretton’s The Glass Cas­tle is based on a mem­oir by Jeanette Walls (here essayed by Brie Lar­son) which recounts the expe­ri­ences of the mid­dle daugh­ter of a dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly, led astray by her eccen­tric father Rex (Woody Har­rel­son). The nar­ra­tive flits between Jeanette’s care­free child­hood to a more con­ven­tion­al adult­hood, and the impact of her father’s errat­ic behav­iour is laid bare.

Rex’s wan­der­lust is ini­tial­ly por­trayed as endear­ing as he, wife Rose Mary (Nao­mi Watts) and their wild brood skip freely from place to place, play­ful­ly avoid­ing any­thing that might be chalked up as respon­si­bil­i­ty. The set up is sim­i­lar to the utopi­an idyll cap­tured in Matt Ross’s Cap­tain Fan­tas­tic, and is also crit­i­cised in sim­i­lar fash­ion. One stand­out sim­i­lar­i­ty is the flame haired off­spring – there is even a crossover in the cast­ing of the younger chil­dren – must be some­thing about red-heads and the per­ils of the great out­doors and home schooling?

Despite its ini­tial lev­i­ty, The Glass Cas­tle soon embraces dark­er themes, par­tic­u­lar­ly when the façade of Rex as the whole­some father is shat­tered – by his per­son­al demon, alco­holism. And the results are writ large, the demon drink’s abil­i­ty to rot away a person’s mind and their fam­i­ly also. Rex con­tin­u­al­ly dis­ap­points his chil­dren, with booze always com­ing first. This mes­sage is some­what dilut­ed by his dream for a sim­pler way of life, away from the evils of soci­ety. The chaos of the shift­ing plot threads means that the nar­ra­tive strug­gles to main­tain a clean focus, always search­ing for some­thing blame for the family’s dis­so­lu­tion. Is it alco­hol, soci­ety, or just some­thing unknow­able inside Rex?

Har­rel­son flip-flops between cru­el­ty and kind­ness, attack­ing his fam­i­ly one moment, extend­ing affec­tion the next. Watts also does well as the woman fol­lows him, effort­less­ly blind to his man­i­fold char­ac­ter defects. The con­trast of a child­hood in rur­al ​‘60s Amer­i­ca and chic New York in the ​‘80s is slight­ly over-egged. Adult Jeanette is coif­fured to with­in an inch of her life, all 80s shoul­der-pads and over­sized jew­ellery (she wouldn’t look out of place in Amer­i­can Psy­cho). Lar­son, mean­while, car­ries off the role of the uptight, scorned daugh­ter seam­less­ly, and her clash­es with Har­rel­son are some of the film’s high points. It’s an inter­est­ing and sin­cere­ly emo­tion­al film, if not an entire­ly suc­cess­ful one.