THE GLASS CASTLE – Review

With just a few weeks left in the big Summer season, Hollywood hopes to get a slight jump on the serious Fall/Winter awards time with an adaptation of an acclaimed biographical novel. Oh, and it’s a “heart-tugger’ about an offbeat family. Now, such movies can be heartwarming like MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS and I REMEMBER MAMA, or countless other syrupy-sweet homages to home and hearth. And then there’s the opposite, the tough profiles of hard lives with difficult heads of the household like THE GREAT SANTINI or (gasp) MOMMIE DEAREST. Really, this new flick could almost be “Daddy Dearest”, as its main focus is a man who made life difficult for his offspring, due partly to his boozing, but mainly because he could never really realize his dreams, particularly his elaborate, unmade plans for THE GLASS CASTLE.

Those blueprints are a long ago memory for successful New York magazine gossip columnist Jeannette Walls (Brie Larson) in those “go-go” 1980’s (89 to be precise, complete with big hair and padded shoulders). After work, she’s helping her fiancée David (Max Greenfield) schmooze a new potential client for his investment company. When David speaks (lies really) of her family background, Jeannette has a distant look. When dinner is over, David rushes back to his office as she takes a cab back to their posh apartment. Zipping through a rough side of town, Jeannette recognizes a familiar face rummaging around the trash cans. Is it…Daddy? Her mind drifts back to her grade school years, actually she didn’t attend because of their families nomadic ways. Mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) was a flighty artist “wannabe” would could never sell a painting, and father Rex (Woody Harrelson) couldn’t seem to hold a job, nor could he hold his liquor. But he had dreams of housing his family in a spectacular glass house. Most of his time he avoided landlords, and after springing young Jeannette from a hospital (she was injured while momma was otherwise occupied), Rex loaded up her siblings, older sister Lori, kid brother Brian, and baby Maureen, and drove into the desert. Most of their childhood was spent living in squalor (shacks with no running water or electricity) and going to bed hungry (while Rex uses their funds to get his drink on). Finally they settled in his hometown of Welch, West Virginia, where Jeannette secretly supervised her siblings’ enrollment in school and formulated a plan of escape. But somehow Rex and Rose Mary are now living in NYC, squatting with others in a condemned building. Jeannette feels she must reach out to them and relate her wedding plans. But will they accept David? And can she reconcile her past and make peace with them after she’s begun her new life?

For the film’s marketers, the big selling point of the flick may be last year’s Best Actress Oscar winner Brie Larson, though it’s not her first screen work since ROOM (the action flicks FREE FIRE and KONG: SKULL ISLAND precede this). It is a serious, somber work that’s ripe for critic and Academy attention. However, it’s not the “show-iest” of roles here as she has to be the voice of reason in many sequences (she plays Jeannette from high school to present day). Still, she conveys the concern, the embarrassment, and the conflict as she tries to deal with the frustrations and mixed emotions that swirl around her past. Oh, and kudos to the talented actresses playing the role at different ages, young Ella Anderson, and even younger Chandler Head. Nope, that “show-y” role in this flick is that of daddy Rex, and Harrelson attacks it with gusto, like a starving man at a buffet. Somehow this part has elements of his two other big film roles this year. There’s the quirky stubbornness of WILSON along with the unpredictable violence of the General in WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. Rex can be unbearably aggravating, but Harrelson is able to temper that with his “hangdog” charm (despite that “floppy” back toupee and nauseating chain-smoking). His partner, Rose Mary isn’t nearly as interesting, but Watts brings a twittery, flighty dignity to this woman with more opinions than talent, who can’t paint worth a lick, but tries to paint a sunny picture of their wretched existence for her kids. Greenfield has a role more thankless than hers or Larson as the smiling straight man to the unhinged Rex (they even riff on the sweat scene from BROADCAST NEWS). Sure he’s rather be sipping wine with the Crane brothers, but he’s undeserving of the treatment he receives (especially from Jeannette). And praise must be given to an almost unrecognizable Robin Bartlett (Paul’s sis on TV’s “Mad About You”) as Rex’s monster of a mother. She’s a chilling portrait of dead-eyed evil.

When researching this film prior to screening it, I was delighted to see that it marked a reunion of sorts between Larson and director Destin Daniel Cretton. This is the first time they’ve worked together since the wonderful indie comedy/drama SHORT TERM 12 from four years ago. Unfortunately my expectation were not met with this new project. The atmosphere of the changing time periods from the mid sixties to the early nineties are well recreated, and the location photography from the dusty Southwest to vibrant green Virginia to the bustling “big apple” is impressive. The problem with the film is the script, particularly the inconsistent attitude toward Rex and Rose Mary. At one point, they’re presented as eccentric, non-conformist rascals with a twinkle in their eyes, while at other times they’re shown as the very worst kind of care-givers ever. The film seems to want to have it both ways, ending with sequences that seem to proclaim, “Sure they have their faults, but look…aren’t they sweet as they give of their time?”. Nope, doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t matter his personal demons, a father shouldn’t booze it up as his kids starve. And Rose Mary is a true enabler (anyone else would have taken the kids out of there during one of his drunken stupors). You wonder where the authorities were (perhaps they couldn’t keep track of these nomads), since the opening flashback accident and their horrific “swimming lesson” merited an extended stay at the “gray bar hotel”. Worst of all, the film wants to romantize, even wallow in their poverty, seeming like a somber riff on the Monty Python “Four Yorkshire Men” sketch (“We dreamed of livin’ in a hole in the ground. 24 of us lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road!”). Despite the talented cast THE GLASS CASTLE is a shattered, broken misguided mess.

2.5 out of 5