Four stars. Rated PG-13, and generously, for dramatic intensity, family dysfunction, children in peril, and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang
And I thought Detroit was hard to watch.
(It is. So’s this one.)
As Friedrich Nietzsche observed,
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
Jeannette Walls must be pretty
damn strong.
Walls’ riveting — and frequently
heartbreaking — 2005 account of a childhood spent with nomadic and unstable
parents remained a fixture on the New
York Times Best Seller list for an astonishing 261 weeks. The book is a deeply
personal memoir told with grace, perceptive intelligence and unexpected wit; it
leaves readers not only with great respect for Walls — and her three siblings —
as survivors, but also emphasizes the spiritual importance of closure and
forgiveness.
Most readers undoubtedly finished
the final pages with awe, thinking, You’re a better, nobler soul than I, Ms.
Walls.
Her book has been transformed
into an equally compelling film by up-and-coming director Destin Daniel
Cretton, who with co-scripter Andrew Lanham has distilled the crucial essence
and vitality of Walls’ book, while miraculously finding the heart of a saga
that feels unrelentingly tragic. Granted, he had help: not only from his three
primary stars, but also from an impressively well-selected collection of young
actors.
Everybody turns in a masterful,
thoroughly persuasive performance. Which, of course, makes the film that much
harder to watch.
Cretton begins his film in 1989.
Jeannette (Brie Larson) is polished, poised and refined: every inch a late
twentysomething Manhattan journalist, regaling friends and professional acquaintances
with often hilarious tales of her encounters while penning the “Intelligencer”
column for New York magazine. She’s
engaged to marry David (Max Greenfield), an ambitious financial advisor on the
fast track to Big Apple aristocracy.
But we sense something. Jeannette
is too elegant: less a human being
and more a porcelain doll. Larson’s features are frozen, and she moves with a
stiffness that suggests fragility, and the possibility that she might shatter
at any moment.
A chance encounter during a
late-night taxi ride home calls up memories, at which point Cretton establishes
the format for his narrative: Jeannette’s saga will bounce back and forth, from
present to past, until the two intersect.
Young Jeannette (now Chandler
Head) is the middle child in the late 1960s, nestled between older sister Lori
(Olivia Kate Rice) and younger brother Brian (Iain Armitage). They trail in the
wake of parents Rex (Woody Harrelson) and Rose Mary (Naomi Watts), two of the
most self-centered, irresponsible people in the known universe.
They’re fiery, emotionally
unrestrained free spirits with an ingrained contempt for authority and
institutions, whether employers or public schools or hospitals: nomadic at a
time when “living off the grid” wasn’t yet a lifestyle.
Absolutely the last two people who should bear and
attempt to raise children. And yet Rose Mary is pregnant with No. 4: Maureen.
Rex is a mean drunk, prone to
explosions of temper and acts of staggering emotional cruelty. Rose Mary, a
classic enabler, fancies herself a bohemian painter and justifies neglect on
the basis of being in “artistic moments.”
Life with these two is an hourly,
daily, weekly, monthly, yearly
onslaught of child abuse; attempting to describe it as “benign” is being much
too kind. Some patrons walked out off Wednesday evening’s preview screening,
and I couldn’t fault them; Cretton’s approach may not be exploitative — he
doesn’t rub our noses in it — but the mere depiction of such events is
shattering.
And yet ...
Harrelson, a black-eyed nightmare
when Rex is drunk, makes him devilishly charismatic at other times: a
self-taught engineer/scientist with an impressive facility for stray facts, who
enchants his children, captures their imagination and exhorts them to embrace
life fearlessly.
Watts, in turn, makes Rose Mary a
tragic figure: a self-proclaimed “excitement addict” forever trapped in orbit
around Rex’s dark star.
The question — the crucial question, for which Cretton
demands an answer — is whether we can look beyond the unrelenting parental
cruelty, to view Rose Mary as merely pathetic, and Rex as a guy unable to rise
above his own inner demons, who expresses love the best way he can, given his own
loveless upbringing.
(And boy, if you think Jeannette
and her siblings have things tough — and, no question, they do — wait’ll you
meet Rex’s mother.)
I suspect most viewers will find
understanding impossible, let alone forgiveness. And yet there’s no denying the
moments of magic between Harrelson and, most particularly, Anderson, as the
teenage Jeannette. She has grown up at the right time, and at the right age, to
be the most enchanted by her father’s wild flights of fancy: most particularly
the literal “glass castle” — solar-powered, no less — that he has long promised
to build, in order to house his family in a luxury they’ve never known.
Against all expectation, Cretton
draws moments of mutual devotion, between Harrelson and Anderson, on par with
the touching dynamic Chris Evans shared with young Mckenna Grace, earlier this
year in Gifted.
But can such sweet intimacy
compensate for the horrors of life with Rex, all the rest of the time?
Likely not.
When all four children and even
Rose Mary finally rebel over a peripatetic life of hovels, filthy campgrounds,
unpaid landlords, child welfare investigators and condescending (or, worse yet,
pitying) glances, Rex finally moves them back to his home town of Welch, West
Virginia, a declining mining community that nonetheless offers undreamt-of
stability.
Despite the fact that they move
into a squalid, ramshackle house with neither electricity nor running water.
Back in the present, we’re
astonished — after the first lengthy flashback — to discover that all three of
Jeannette’s siblings also have survived, even thrived, and live in close
proximity to each other. Lori (Sarah Snook), ever the realist, has matured into
a wise woman who clearly knows Jeannette better than she knows herself. Brian
(Josh Caras) is a policeman.
We’re not so sure about Maureen
(Brigette Lundy-Paine), who has the scattered bearing of a lost soul: perhaps
one short step from straying off the path, and never finding her way back. But
the bond between these four is palpable, and all four actors — Larson, Snook,
Caras and Lundy-Paine — share the easy, reflexive dynamic that bespeaks
ferocious sibling loyalty.
We bleed for Greenfield’s David,
genuinely devoted to Jeannette — offering comfort and constancy — and yet not
quite able to navigate his way to her soul. He knows this; Greenfield’s often
wary gaze conveys the anxiety of a guy who worries that he’ll never fully
satisfy the “mountain goat” — Rex’s pet name for his middle daughter — who has
captured his heart.
The film’s near-unrelenting
melancholy tone is enhanced by songwriter/composer Joel P. West, whose
evocative underscore is complemented by well-placed songs such as Waylon
Jennings’ “My World,” Kitty Wells’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and Cole Porter’s
“Don’t Fence Me In.”
Harrelson and Watts have the
showy roles, conveying their characters’ unrestrained eccentricities and
breathtaking selfishness with a force likely to induce nightmares for weeks to
come. (I sure didn’t sleep well, for several nights, thinking about this film.)
Larson has the tougher, far
subtler assignment. Jeannette is the individual who changes: not just once, but
twice. It’s easy to understand the shift when Anderson, as the adolescent
Jeannette, finally — reluctantly — allows worshipful devotion to crumble away,
after too much disappointment and bad behavior on Rex’s part: a transition that
the young actress conveys with heartbreaking credibility.
The adult Jeannette’s conversion
is far subtler, much more intriguing, and perhaps a tougher sell. It’s not hard
to understand why she has changed so much — too
much — in order to distance herself from her parents, in every conceivable way.
Getting us to accept her eventual decision to swing back a bit — to more
comfortably center herself — requires truly delicate thespic skills, and Larson
pulls it off.
Whether Cretton and Lanham
succeed in their sidebar goal is another matter. Can Rex and Rose Mary,
ultimately, be forgiven for their behavior? Should
they be? That’s a tough sell, after spending two full hours watching four
children endure so much.
All of which makes The Glass Castle a film to be admired —
much like Walls’ book — but probably not one to enjoy.
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