Dysfunction, kid’s-eye view
To watch “The Glass Castle” is to feel trapped inside Jeanette Walls’ childhood. It is to feel at the mercy of a father who is brilliant and the source of all fun — a font of affection, wisdom and approval — who also is vindictive, cruel and selfish beyond all measure. To navigate the nooks and crannies of such a personality would be difficult for an adult, but for a child it’s impossible, a terrifying and scarring experience.
The movie is based on Walls’ best-selling memoir of the same name, and there is a certain Stockholm syndrome quality about the film, which is its great weakness. We come away feeling that, for all Walls’ candor, Walls is protecting her father’s memory, or protecting a story that she has been telling herself and needs to believe.
Yet to some extent, that weakness is also the movie’s strength, because “The Glass Castle” captures in a rare way a child’s perspective. It makes you feel what it’s like to be tiny and dealing with an allpowerful tyrant who is not only crazy but knows he has absolute license to be crazy, and enjoys that license. In this way, Walls’ story is not unique. Indeed for many of us, it dredges up memories.
The role of the father gives Woody Harrelson a chance to do almost everything he does onscreen in a single performance. He is loving, tender and sweet. He is funny and engaging and miserable and lashing out, with a mean streak that’s more than a streak, that’s like a superhighway that goes from the top of his head and then past his feet and deep into hell. Harrelson swings from boundless selflove to self-hatred in this role, and he would have been better served by a film that didn’t endorse either of those inflated self-conceptions. Instead, “The Glass Castle” leans on the side of love for a man who, on the evidence presented here at least, did not deserve it.
The story takes place in two time periods. In the first, in 1989, Jeanette (Brie Larson) is a gossip columnist for a major New York magazine, and she is engaged to marry a finance executive (Max Greenfield). Coming back from a fancy dinner, she sees her parents, Rex (Harrelson) and Rose Mary (Naomi Watts), rooting through garbage cans. Yes, her parents have followed her to the Big Apple, where they are living as squatters.
Mostly, though, “The Glass Castle” takes place in flashback, through incidents that recount Walls’ bizarre childhood. Basically, Jeanette and her three siblings lived under the yoke of parents who were rootless, who moved from town to town, squatting in most places. Rex, who was probably bipolar, drank constantly and, in his grandiose moments, would talk about someday building a glass castle. And the mother painted pictures. Half the time, the kids went hungry.
Though Rex and Rose Mary talk a good game about living outside societal norms, they are a conventional couple for their time in one crucial way: The husband is boss. Thus, Watts must give a self-effacing performance, a free spirit who pretends to be free, but who sees and accepts her constraints. This has consequences for her children, in that she provides no buffer between them and their erratic father.
This is really the kids’ story, particularly Jeanette’s story, and the movie responds by finding a pair of wonderful child actresses to play Jeanette at her various stages. As the youngest Jeanette (around 7 or 8), Chandler Head watches her father with a touch of fear but mostly wonder. These emotions become more complicated by the time she is 11 or 12. In that later stage, Ella Anderson shows us a little girl who is proud of her special connection to Daddy and blossoms under his attention, but at the same time is coming into an awareness of his weaknesses, which are not just weaknesses but catastrophic flaws.
There’s a great moment when the father is telling her that he would do anything for her — this, after squandering all the food money on a drinking binge and leaving the children hungry. Jeanette, ever so delicately, responds by asking, “Do you think maybe you can stop drinking?” — and he asks her to leave the room. In this household of supposed freedom, there really is only one person allowed to express an emotion, and that’s the father. Everyone else must fall in line with dad’s emotion of the day, or the minute.
By the end, it seems Walls still believes that her father, for all his faults, was something wonderful, and that carries into the film in ways that don’t help. A good person and a good parent isn’t good only 50 percent of the time, when it suits his mood, or even 80 percent of the time. But then we’re all under the cloud of our childhoods and what seemed to us normal growing up.
Still the spectacle of this, of beautiful, sensitive children at the mercy of damaged adults — this is what we take from “The Glass Castle.” It’s a universal awfulness rendered with truth and detail, and somehow that’s enough.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle