The Glass Castle
“Despite addiction being one of the main themes of the film, The Glass Castle fails to adequately address the issue.”
Title: The Glass Castle (2017)
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton 👨🏻🇺🇸
Writers: Destin Daniel Cretton 👨🏻🇺🇸 and Andrew Lanham 👨🏼🇺🇸 based on the book by Jeannette Walls 👩🏼🇺🇸
Reviewed by Anni Glissman 👩🏼🇺🇸🌈
Technical: 2/5
There’s a moment at the beginning of The Glass Castle when Jeannette Walls (Brie Larson) slides low in the back of a cab on her way home from dinner at a swanky Manhattan restaurant. She’s avoiding her parents Rex (Woody Harrelson) and Rose Mary (Naomi Watts), who are houseless by choice and digging through trash on the street in front of her. But then Rex spots her—he lets out a wounded cry and runs after the cab, but Jeannette stays low in her seat.
When she recounts the incident to her sister, she’s asked why she didn’t stop. “I don’t know,” she replies, still shocked at her own actions. But then...that’s it. That’s the end of the scene, with no follow-up whatsoever. The moment becomes a harbinger of the film’s weak spots to come: Over and over, an interesting conflict comes to light only to be left unexplored. It makes the film feel frustratingly incomplete.
Adapted from Walls’ 2005 memoir of the same name, The Glass Castle leaps back and forth between the 1960s and 1980s to contextualize the family’s dysfunctional dynamic. It’s an ambitious amount of ground to cover and as a result, director Destin Daniel Cretton tries to pack in too many scenes. At a total runtime of two hours and seven minutes, the film manages to feel both too long and yet, insufficient. Flashbacks to the Walls siblings’ childhood dominate, which is a shame because they’re much less interesting than watching them navigate their relationships with their parents as adults. Also, sadly because the film continues to jump back and forth between eras, Brie Larson is robbed of adequate screen time. When her stellar performance easily comprises the most compelling part of The Glass Castle, that loss is keenly felt.
Woody Harrelson is brilliant too, bringing all his usual presence to the role. However, the plot offers his character no personal growth to balance his larger-than-life energy. Without strong writing behind him, Harrelson crashes through his scenes like a misfired cannon.
Ultimately, the bleak picture of the Walls’ family life in the 1960s makes it hard to understand why, less than two decades later, they’ve prioritized living in the same city. The film skips straight from the siblings escaping their toxic home life in West Virginia to everyone coming together for family dinners in New York. We’re never given an idea of what might have transpired to bring the family back together, or why Rex and Rose Mary moved from West Virginia to New York in the first place. It’s omissions like this one that make it hard to connect the characters to their younger counterparts—and hard for the viewer to connect with them at all.
Gender: 4/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
As an adult, Jeannette navigates her way through her relationship, career, and the high society world she writes about with ease. She glosses over her unstable upbringing at business dinners and parties, but she knows herself and is unafraid to call attention to her past: In the movie’s opening scene, she asks for a to-go bag at a fancy restaurant and doesn’t waver when her fiancé tries to pass her request off as a joke. “I never joke about food,” she shoots back without missing a beat. Her strong relationship with her sisters throughout the film also does a lot of work balancing out its tendency to focus too much on Rex.
In addition, the film includes a plotline where a man is sexually abused and hints at the lifelong ramifications of surviving such an experience. Too often sexual abuse in media is only shown as it applies to women, so it’s encouraging to see this plotline introduced.
The Glass Castle loses a point, however, for its treatment of Rose Mary. The matriarch of the Walls family falls into the familiar role of the loyal and long-suffering wife. We see her repeatedly recognizing Rex’s problems, but we never learn why she chooses to stay. By the time she and her husband are squatting in an abandoned building in New York City, Rose Mary seems somehow less aware of his faults than she was two decades ago. We never see the backstory behind their housing situation, but given Rose Mary’s insistence on finding stable housing earlier in the film, it seems strange that she would suddenly assent to this lifestyle. As a result, her older character feels at odds with her younger self, as if she’s now a different person entirely.
Race: 3/5
It’s positive to see Hawaiian filmmaker Cretton, who is multiracial with Japanese, Irish, and Slovak heritage, given the latitude to make a movie that doesn’t focus on race. (His previous film, 2019’s Just Mercy, deals explicitly with criminal justice reform and the upcoming Shang-Chi features the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first Asian superhero lead alongside a robust cast of Asian talent from across the globe.)
But in The Glass Castle, the absence of characters of color feels striking, especially during scenes that take place in the diverse metropolis of New York City, which is portrayed as staggeringly homogenous. In addition, the Walls family lives in many different states throughout the scenes set in the ‘60s, but we only catch one mention of the Civil Rights movement that comes when the Walls are swimming at a segregated public pool. Rex scolds the pool’s owner for the discriminatory policy, but it feels like an afterthought; he only does so because he’s angry and embarrassed that he’s being kicked out for something unrelated.
The overall lack of racial diversity in the film is probably due to its narrow focus on the Walls family itself, but it strips the story of meaningful cultural and social context that might have strengthened the weak script.
Deduction for Disability: -1.00
If The Glass Castle has a villain, it’s Rex’s alcoholism. In one painful scene, he attempts to detox at home and suffers severe withdrawals that terrify the kids. Despite his addiction being one of the main themes of the film, Rex never seeks professional treatment. By the time he and Jeannette reconcile in adulthood, he is clearly still drinking but they neatly sidestep the issue. Instead, their tumultuous relationship is framed as a difference in worldview—the dreamer versus the pragmatic—and the film once again misses a chance at any meaningful exploration of a complex issue.
Mediaversity Grade: C- 2.67/5
Ultimately, The Glass Castle tries to do too much. In covering such a large span of time, the film doesn’t leave itself room to tell its story well. False starts and loose ends litter the narrative. Some are small, like Rex and Rose Mary living in New York City with no explanation. Others are gaping, like the lack of real resolution around abuse shown throughout the film. These missteps make it hard to connect the film’s two threads and as a result, The Glass Castle ends up feeling fractured and unsatisfying.