Destin Daniel Cretton (2017)
The first part of the IMDB headline describes The Glass Castle accurately: ‘A young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of non-conformist nomads with a mother who’s an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father …’ Destin Daniel Cretton’s film – with a screenplay by the director, Andrew Lanham and Marti Noxon – is based on a memoir of the same name by the American journalist Jeannette Walls. Published in 2005, Walls’s book spent 261 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The film version has had a shorter stay in London cinemas. It opened the first weekend in October; the first weekend in November it’s nowhere to be seen. There are several good reasons for that.
In particular, something has gone badly wrong with Cretton’s storytelling. Even when there’s an occasional strong scene, its context is liable to be baffling. After one especially spectacular falling out with their dominating father Rex, the four Walls children, by this stage in or approaching their teens, determine to go to school. (Jeannette, the second of three daughters, is the most strong-willed of the quartet and, in effect, their leader.) It’s not clear whether Rex and his wife Rose Mary have thwarted previous attempts by the kids to get conventional education and, if so, what has changed now to mean that Jeannette and her siblings will eventually get what they want, as they seem to succeed in doing. It’s not clear either what home schooling they’ve had hitherto. (Last year’s Captain Fantastic dodged the question of how Viggo Mortensen’s protagonist envisaged his children’s long-term future but at least gave a picture of the idiosyncratic education they were getting from him.) The last bit of the IMDB summary (after the ellipsis above) is ‘who would stir the children’s imagination with hope as a distraction to their poverty’. It’s true that Rex can be more fun to be around than the drippy, distraite Rose Mary but IMDB ‘s words seriously overstate what Cretton realises on screen.
The narrative switches between the present day, when Jeannette (Brie Larson) is a successful New York-based gossip columnist, preparing to wed her financier boyfriend David (Max Greenfield), and flashbacks to her turbulent girlhood and adolescence. As she takes a cab home after dinner with David and two of his clients in a posh restaurant, Jeannette catches sight of her parents on the pavement, rooting around in litterbins. Soon after that, we learn that Rex (Woody Harrelson) and Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) are living in a squat, as they have done for much of their adult lives. The crude polarisation of street life and Wall Street life in these opening sequences immediately makes this true story seem a false one. The description of Jeannette’s earlier years is rather better. In spite of the sketchy background noted above (the details of Rex’s unstable employment history are also sparse), there’s more connection between Woody Harrelson and twelve-year-old Ella Anderson, who plays the adolescent Jeannette, than there is between him and Brie Larson.
In his previous film, Short Term 12 (2013), Destin Daniel Cretton provided Larson with what turned out to be her breakthrough role. In the meantime, she has won numerous prizes, including the Best Actress Oscar, for Lenny Abrahamson’s Room (2015). Larson is an actress who registers a character’s thoughts and feelings more forcefully than fluidly. (The type has often proved popular with Academy voters: Sally Field and Hilary Swank, for example, are both dual Best Actress winners.) It’s true that the adult Jeannette, for much of the present-tense story, is meant to be tensely suppressing her true feelings but Brie Larson is no more expressive when she eventually yields to these feelings than when she’s denying them. It’s no surprise that Jeannette’s marriage to Max Greenfield’s David is short-lived; it’s utterly mysterious as to what drew them together in the first place and keeps them together until Jeannette discovers that blood’s thicker than water. To be fair to Larson, the weak script would make it hard for anyone to carry off the role. In an early flashback scene, Rose Mary is so preoccupied doing her (crap) painting that she tells the infant Jeannette (Chandler Head) to check on a pan on the cooker; the child stands on a stool to do so and her dress catches fire. Later on, we get a brief sight of the accident’s legacy. The older Jeannette has severe scarring on her upper body; Larson’s face tells us that she’s understandably very self-conscious about this. There’s not a hint of how much, if at all, she overcomes these feelings to enjoy physical relationships as an adult. Cretton seems just about as negligent a writer as Rose Mary is a mother.
As the short-fuse, alcoholic, life-force paterfamilias, Woody Harrelson is really trying. He gets across, sometimes impressively, Rex’s confusion of angry self-pity and egocentric humour. It’s obvious, however, long before the obligatory still photographs of the real-life originals at the end of the film, that the robust, pugnacious Harrelson is physically miscast. As with Shia LaBeouf in Borg vs McEnroe, the film-makers appear to think all that’s needed to make an actor resemble the actual person he’s impersonating is a hairdo – but at least Janus Metz had no choice: he could hardly alter the basic appearance of someone as recently famous as John McEnroe. Since virtually no one has a picture of Rex Walls in their mind’s eye, the decision to give Woody Harrelson a dark wig, without altering his fair skin colouring, is hard to understand. The wig emphasises the breadth of Harrelson’s face, which doesn’t remotely suggest a man wasted by years of hard drinking. He is the best reason to see the film, though. As his wife, Naomi Watts commits an unusual offence for an actor of not acting crazy enough – her Rose Mary is, for the most part, merely scatterbrained.
The Glass Castle is one of those titles that’s intriguing for a couple of seconds – until, that is, you realise it gives the story away. Designing a glass castle as the family home turns out to be Rex’s longstanding, never fulfilled project. When he, Rose Mary and the kids visit his hillbilly mother (well played by Robin Bartlett), Rex’s instant switch into meekness also has a momentary effect that quickly gives way to another: puzzlement is followed by the realisation that his change of mood signals that Rex was sexually abused as a boy. His unhappy background is not enough to account for Jeannette’s eventual reconciliation with her destructive and differently abusive father on his deathbed. The bizarre sentimentality of the film’s ending is the only thing about The Glass Castle that’s breathtaking.
11 October 2017
