This story’s too dark for an uplifting payoff
The Glass Castle
12A cert, 127 min
Dir Destin Daniel Cretton Starring
Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, Max Greenfield, Sarah Snook
The Glass Castle attempts a dramatic trajectory that’s doomed to failure, and is more about good actors diligently distracting us from the problem than solving it. It’s based on a 2005 memoir about terrible parenting by Jeannette Walls, an American gossip columnist whose childhood was nomadic, often squalid, and marked by episodes of eye-widening trauma and abuse.
At the age of three, she was set on fire in the kitchen, when her mother – played with a paintbrush nearpermanently in hand by Naomi Watts – left her unattended, cooking hot dogs on the stove. The incident is the worst thing the young Jeannette suffered, albeit one of the briefest – well into her teenage years, her parents were yanking her in and out of squats, barely feeding her for days, and never accumulating the funds to lodge any of their four children in a fixed home.
Raging against the establishment and any other target going, her father Rex (Woody Harrelson) would waste their last few dollars on booze and once nearly shoved his wife out of a window. His idea of swimming lessons was to fling Jeannette backwards into a public pool and watch her flounder. The film presents him as a radical thinker and borderline psychopath – imagine Viggo Mortensen’s character from Captain Fantastic crossed with Robert De Niro in Cape Fear. It’s at the very least a meaty part for Harrelson, who has mastered the business on film of swilling from a whisky glass, twisting his mouth, and fixing a sardonic stare at whoever is giving him trouble. Rex’s confrontation with a doctor after the stove incident, which left Jeannette with lifelong scars, is a brutal screed against the iniquities of US healthcare. Harrelson clearly relishes the irony, in scene after scene like this, of articulating a wild, challenging vision of the world while not having a leg to stand on.
Unfortunately, as this script manoeuvres its way towards a cathartic deathbed reconciliation between Rex and the adult Jeannette, it increasingly doesn’t have much of one to stand on either, although Brie Larson puts up all the fight she can muster. This is a reunion of sorts with Destin Daniel Cretton, the writerdirector who gave her a breakthrough in the troubled-teen drama Short Term 12. Larson’s reading of Jeannette as a career-woman – polished, brittle, hiding her damage – is sensitive and convincing. She has invented a cover story about her parents to smooth things over for the benefit of her Wall Street fiancé (Max Greenfield, who’s excellent too). But the Wallses, who she sometimes sees rooting around in trash on the streets of New York, won’t stop intruding on her life, passing judgment, making a mess.
Many of the confrontation scenes come to life pretty well, especially two: a drunken arm-wrestling bout between Harrelson and Greenfield; and a father-daughter face-off at her engagement party. But we can’t be subjected to this much awful behaviour and then obediently swallow the bromide that blood is thicker than water. The film’s sentimental instincts jar so awkwardly with its pain that the push for some final uplift feels unmistakably forced.