Taglines: Home goes wherever we go.
Chronicling the adventures of an eccentric, resilient and tight-knit family, The Glass Castle is a remarkable story of unconditional love. Oscar winner Brie Larson brings Jeannette Walls’s best-selling memoir to life as a young woman who, influenced by the joyfully wild nature of her deeply dysfunctional father (Woody Harrelson), found the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.
The film is based on the bestselling memoir of the same name by former New York gossip columnist Jeannette Walls. In it, she recalls a childhood of poverty, uncertainty and neglect. As one of four children of an abusive, alcoholic father and a selfish artist mother, Jeannette learned to fend for herself and care for her sisters and brother at a young age, even as they were moved from town to town, kept out of school and often left hungry for days.
The Glass Castle is a 2017 American biographical drama film directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and written by Cretton, Andrew Lanham, and Marti Noxon, based on Jeannette Walls’s 2005 memoir of the same name. Depicting Walls’s real-life childhood spent squatting in homes and living in poverty, the film stars Brie Larson as Walls with Naomi Watts, Woody Harrelson, Max Greenfield, and Sarah Snook in supporting roles. The film was released on August 11, 2017, by Lionsgate and received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the performances of its cast (particularly Larson and Harrelson) but criticized the mishandled tones and material.
The Glass Castle grossed $17.3 million in the United States and Canada and $3.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $21.2 million. In North America, The Glass Castle was released alongside The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature and Annabelle: Creation, and was projected to gross around $5 million from 1,461 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $1.7 million on its first day and $4.7 million over the weekend, finishing 9th at the box office. The film made $2.6 million in its second weekend (a drop of 45.5%), finishing 12th.
gives a performance of borderline unwatchable hamminess in this really tiresome film, which sentimentally neutralises parental abuse into a supposedly fascinating angel/devil split. Admittedly, this isn’t as purely insufferable as Viggo Mortensen in the comparably wince-inducing Captain Fantastic. But almost. A radioactive sentimentality oozes from the screen, although it is saved, just a little, by the robustness of Brie Larson’s presence.
The film is based on a bestselling 2005 memoir by US columnist and author Jeannette Walls, about her anarchic upbringing at the hands of an alcoholic, bipolar dad, who always kept his bewildered wife and kids on the move, one step ahead of the debt collectors, rattling all across the country. He is Rex, a brilliant but feckless individual: free-thinker, scientist and engineer, entrancing his trusting and saucer-eyed children with his plans to build them a glass castle of his own design. But his whisky and indiscipline keeps them hungry and confused and often in danger from stove hobs etc.
Harrelson plays him as a life-affirming wildman, glamorised as a rebel that you hate for his cruelty but of course can’t help loving for his adorable passion. Naomi Watts gets to play his dozy, feather-brained wife, and Larson plays his daughter Jeannette in disillusioned later years, an uptight and controlling career woman who has utterly rejected her dad’s anti-materialism in ways that are intended to suggest that maybe she’s kind of got it wrong and just needs to heal.
The film is structured in such a way that you consent to an insidious balance: loathing and loving Rex before finally giving him the benefit of the doubt. A rigged game, as Rex himself occasionally rants, and a shallow, treacly piece of work.
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The Glass Castle (2017)
Directed by: Destin Daniel Cretton
Starring: Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, Ella Anderson, Chandler Head, Max Greenfield, Charlie Shotwell, Olivia Kate Rice, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Shree Crooks, Eden Grace Redfield
Screenplay by: Destin Daniel Cretton, Andrew Lanham
Production Design by: Sharon Seymour
Cinematography by: Brett Pawlak
Film Editing by: Nat Sanders
Costume Design by: Joy Cretton, Mirren Gordon-Crozier
Set Decoration by: Suzanne Cloutier, Sébastien Thivierge, Manon Thomas
Art Direction by: Nicolas Lepage, Charlotte Rouleau
Music by: Joel P. West
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content involving family dysfunction, and for some language and smoking.
Distributed by: Lionsgate Films
Release Date: August 11, 2017
