Harrelson as a wild and crazy dad in ‘The Glass Castle’
LOS ANGELES (AP) — "The Glass Castle" wrestles with two conflicting impulses: the longing for order and the desire for wildness. The main object of that ambivalence is Rex Walls, a big-talking, big-dreaming ne'er-do-well played with the usual guile and gusto by Woody Harrelson.
Rex would qualify as a helicopter parent if that phrase referred to someone who encouraged his kid to pilot a chopper without proper training or safety equipment. If he and his wife, Rose Mary (Naomi Watts), don't go quite that far, it may only be for lack of available aircraft. Their four children are, to use another slightly anachronistic idiom in reference to a story set mostly in the '60s and '70s, decidedly free range. At a swimming pool, Rex throws Jeannette, his second-oldest daughter, into deep water to teach her to swim. That's hardly the craziest thing he does, but it's a convenient metaphor for his approach to parenting.
Jeannette, played in middle childhood by a wonderfully shrewd and watchful young actress named Ella Anderson, will grow up to be played by Brie Larson and to grapple with adulthood in late-'80s New York, where she writes a gossip column. Eventually, she'll also write a best-selling memoir of her hectic childhood, which has now been adapted into this uneven, conscientious film, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and written by Cretton and Andrew Lanham.
Lacking the book's episodic sprawl and psychological nuance, their movie clings to its essential tension. Jeannette, her father's favorite -- his nickname for her is Mountain Goat -- admires her parents' free-spirited individualism even as she suffers amid the chaos of their chosen way of life. Money is always short, and the family often picks up and moves, one step ahead of bill collectors or law enforcement. Rose Mary paints landscapes, still lifes and portraits, while Rex, bouncing from job to job, conjures fantastical, almost-practical projects, like the solar-powered mansion that gives the movie its title.
The clan's nomadic period, which takes up roughly the first half of Walls' memoir, is truncated on screen, and the audience never gets a full dose of the paternal wanderlust that provides Jeannette's childhood with its thrills and terrors. We spend more time in Welch, West Virginia, Rex's Appalachian hometown, to which he had vowed never to return. Once there, in the shadow of his sinister mother, Erma (Robin Bartlett), Rex starts drinking more and dreaming less. As his charm dissolves, he devolves from a mischievous daredevil into a ranting, tyrannical drunk.
Meanwhile, in the film's back-and-forth time scheme, adult Jeannette tries to find a place for her past (and her parents, who are now squatting on Manhattan's pre-gentrified Lower East Side) in her polished, professional existence. What this mostly means is trying to reconcile her attachment to Rex with her engagement to David, a sacrificial yuppie played by Max Greenfield. He's not a bad guy, he just cares about money, material possessions and what other people think. All of that makes him, somewhat too obviously, Rex's opposite.
While Jeannette's attempt to deal with the men in her life provides "The Glass Castle" with a bit of drama (and some comic scenes as well), it's frustrating to see the resourceful Larson pinioned between two showy male performers. Jeannette, the central voice and consciousness in the book, is an oddly blurred character on screen. And the film itself loses focus as it drifts toward the conventions of the coming-of-age story and the family-dysfunction melodrama.