The Glass Castle explores family dysfunction
The Glass Castle explores life of a dysfunctional family
It’s fashionable these days to joke that “dysfunctional” should be part of the definition of “family,” but clearly some clans are more faulty than others.
Take writer Jeannette Walls, whose 2005 memoir forms the rough foundation of The Glass Castle. She grew up in Arizona (and in California, Nevada and West Virginia), where her parents were forever running from debt collectors, while the children — three girls and a boy — learned through trial and error to feed and fend for themselves. Their parents had some skills, but parenting was not one of them.
As adapted by Andrew Lanham and director Destin Daniel Cretton (they also worked on
The Shack, which turned out better than expected), The Glass Castle bounces between 1989, when a grown-up Jeannette (Brie Larson) is working in New York and engaged to be married, and the mid-1970s as young Jeannette (Chandler Head giving way to Ella Anderson) tries to make sense of her father’s bizarre, alcohol-fuelled mix of charm and self-destructive behaviour.
The parents are superbly played by Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson, whose chemistry is just about perfect. Watts disappears into the role of Rose Mary Walls, who was happy if she could be left alone to paint, and deferred to her husband, Rex, not out of fear but more a combination of lack of willpower and shared philosophy of life. Harrelson barrels through the movie as a flawed but weirdly likable character, with an answer for everything, plus a quick right jab reserved for non-family members.
A former Air Force pilot and not unintelligent, Rex at one point consoles a very young Jeannette, who has just burned herself while cooking. He starts with a description of fire, how the edges of the flame are a zone of instability where anything can happen, and then explains: “You just got a little too close to the chaos.”
By the end of their chat, she’s ready to wear the scars on her skin proudly, as a sign of the fire in her belly. And she’s half-convinced that chaos is a trait to be treasured.
The film expertly cuts between the two time periods, with perhaps a touch too much soft focus in the ’70s scenes (if you notice it, it’s not working) but some marvellous period details — like a baby-blue metal Coleman cooler — and some clever thematic echoes: After a flashback to that cooking-fire incident, adult Jeannette walks through a Manhattan restaurant where a chef is working a flaming wok.
The Glass Castle is also one of those movies that pays attention to the little things, like the funeral scene where Jeannette’s uncle isn’t shaking anyone’s hands as they enter.
Not sure why, but it made him more than just a disposable third-tier relative.
It all adds up to a nuanced and emotional tale, anchored by equally fine performances by Larson and Anderson. The younger actress, only 12 years old, pulls off the tightrope-walk of filial affection and a growing unease at her parents’ behaviour. Young performers often act older than their years, but in the case of Walls’ childhood, the mannerisms fit.
The Glass Castle feels a bit like the recent artist biopic Maudie, if the painter had four kids and never found fame. There’s also something of Viggo Mortensen’s character from Captain Fantastic in the iconoclastic dreamer Rex, but with the added frisson of knowing that many of the details are drawn from life rather than a screenwriter’s imagination.
And while few viewers will have faced the depths of poverty and uncertainty that Walls did in her youth, most will appreciate that a line such as “you’re a lot like your father” can be, depending on the speaker and the circumstance, the cruelest rebuke, or the most shining truth.
Naomi Watts doesn’t mind playing messy. In fact, her roles as an addict in 21 Grams and a desperate tsunami survivor in The Impossible earned her best actress Oscar nominations.
In the film version of Jeannette Walls’ bestselling memoir
The Glass Castle, Watts delves into the shambles of a character who’s a neglectful mother, an enabling wife and an obsessed artist.
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, the movie features Brie Larson as Walls, who must deal with her dysfunctional past as part of a poverty-stricken family headed by unfit parents: That’s Rose Mary (Watts) and Rex (Woody Harrelson), a drunk damaged by an abusive childhood.
Watts, a real-life 48-year-old mother of two boys, shares her thoughts on The Glass
Castle.
On preparing for the role: “The script and the book were right there for me to reference. I felt it was a story we could connect with, because we all have crazy members of our families and we’ve all been affected by powerful events in our lives.”
On multiple discussions with
the book’s author: “If a question would come up, we would have a back and forth on email, or sometimes it was a conversation that went both ways where she would talk about her family and I would talk about my family.”
On the co-operative atmosphere
while filming in Montreal: “If you create a team like (director) Destin did with Woody and Brie, and then give us this material that stands on its own, we all knew we would bring something to the film that would be a little different.”
On her style of method acting: “Woody approaches his work in a similar way that I do. Immersing yourself makes it lively and sometimes you run into the magical and surprising moments going off script. But when we did, Destin was always respectful of assessing if it worked.”
On the suggestion that the mom’s
the villain in the story: “That wasn’t how I wanted to play her in the movie, not that I have anything against playing bad guys. I think people were quick to judge the mother from the book and how she parented, even though what Rex did was fairly awful.”
On Rose Mary’s positives in the
film: “The flip side is the mom instilled in the kids that they had to learn to take care of themselves. And I guess I would say (Rose Mary) did have this joie de vivre and creativity, and she did make sure the kids were reading books and embraced who they were.”
On using Rose Mary’s real works
of art in the movie: “Some of them were rented and some of them were purchased. The ones that were rented were too expensive to fit the movie’s budget.”
On selecting less glamorous but
more challenging roles: “I don’t want to get bored, and I always want to stretch as an artist. And that means playing things that scare me a little bit.”