Psst, this gossip queen isn’t what she seems
The Glass Castle (12A) Verdct: Uneven misery memoir
MY DAUGHTER, on a family holiday this summer, read the bestselling memoir on which this film was based. It made her even more a captive to her sunbed than usual; she was transfixed by the story of Jeannette Walls, who overcame a dysfunctional, chaotically nomadic upbringing in the sixties and seventies to become a society gossip columnist in New York City.
The screen adaptation, while watchable enough, is somewhat less than transfixing. Despite the efforts of a strong cast, including Brie Larson as the adult Jeannette, and Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts as her feckless parents, it too often feels manipulative and, even less helpfully, phoney.
It begins in 1989. The grown-up Jeannette is dining in a swanky Manhattan restaurant with her city- slicker fiance (Max greenfield), an ambitious financier who is trying to woo a pair of prospective clients. Jeannette is there to impress, which also means keeping shtum about her parents, who by now are down-and-outs living in a downtown squat.
soon we have whizzed back in time to her impoverished childhood, when she was badly burnt as a direct result of her artist mother’s neglect. From there the film see-saws back and forth in time, showing how Jeannette and her three siblings grew up in thrall to their clever, charismatic, alcoholic father Rex, even as they were being damaged by him.
As Rex, Harrelson gives one of those jaw-juttingly pugnacious performances of his that occasionally make you wish he would rein it in a little.
Watts, such a lovely actress, is, I think, slightly miscast. she is just fine as the bohemian sixties chick, producing lousy paintings and dragging her kids around the country because her husband can’t hold down a job. But even with unwashed hair she’s nobody’s idea — except director Destin Daniel Cretton’s — of a vagrant, rooting through rubbish bins for food. That, we are meant to believe, is what she becomes.
As for Larson, she is perfectly good in a role originally meant for Jennifer Lawrence. But the standout performance comes from Ella Anderson, already an acting veteran at the tender age of 12.
As the adolescent Jeannette, at once magnetised and repulsed by her father, she pretty much steals every scene she’s in, even from the swaggering Harrelson.
His character’s frailties become more explicable when we learn where those demons that he is trying to slay with alcohol come from.
But how sympathetic you find Rex really depends on whether you buy into his notions of parenting, which hold that schoolwork comes a poor second to lying in the moonlight with your dad, learning about the solar system.
In certain philosophical ways, The glass Castle — its title taken from the towering edifice Rex ambitiously promises to build for Jeannette — is similar to last year’s Captain Fantastic. That, too, was about a father with radical ideas about home-schooling.
But this is a less interesting, less engaging film which, its factual origins notwithstanding, never feels quite real enough.