A rancid, hateful disaster of a film, The Glass Castle squanders an incredible cast and a stranger-than-fiction story on a repulsive apologia for child abuse. The Glass Castle may have oh so pretty production values and a tinkling musical score intended to convey how moving and beautiful everything is, but all that energy and craft is devoted to a story about how it’s OK for two repulsive wastes of skin to abuse, ignore, traumatize, drown, starve, burn, isolate, humiliate, and exploit their children because isn’t, like, society the real monster here, man?
I hated this fucking movie. If all you want is a simple “Should I watch this or no?” well, there’s your answer. But if you feel like unpacking this madness, here we go.
Adapted from a best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle opens in 1989 where Jeannette Walls (Brie Larson) has made a comfortable life for herself in NYC, with a steady job as a columnist and a new engagement to Schmidt from New Girl (he’s shallow but sincerely sweet, which is why you hire Schmidt from New Girl). That life is interrupted one night when her taxi is accosted by a couple of dumpster diving homeless people, who turn out to be Jeannette’s own parents, leading Jeannette to re-examine a childhood spent moving unmoored and broke across the U.S., eking out an existence in houses that often had no electricity or running water. These flashbacks are interspersed with returns to 1989, where Jeannette’s parents continue to wreak havoc on her life and engagement. Because they are the worst.
No, seriously. They are the absolute fucking worst, maybe the two most repulsive, monstrous characters I have seen in a movie in a long, long, long time, and I just finished a month of watching almost nothing but movies about murderers and literal actual monsters. Rex (Woody Harrelson) and Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) put them all to shame. Kylo Ren could spend all of The Last Jedi punting adorable puppies into reactor cores, and he still wouldn’t displace either of the Walls parents as the most reprehensible character in a film this year.
When we meet Rose Mary, she refuses to take a break from a shitty painting to feed young Jeannette. When Jeannette tries to make her own lunch using the oven, she is horribly burned. When we meet Rex, he has come to visit Jeannette in the hospital and a doctor is concerned because, you know, a little girl has been horribly burned and she’s not the only child in the family sporting an open wound. Rex’s response to being called out on this is to launch into a speech about how modern medicine is the real monster here, man.
The movie doesn’t stop there, either. As runtime and years elapse, we learn that Rex is near-constantly drunk and will fly into violent rages if his authority is challenged, while Rose Mary exists in an entirely different world from anyone else, babbling on incessantly about her supposedly-burgeoning art career and enabling Rex at every step. We see this behavior through the eyes of their children, registering every scar, physical and emotional, that these destructive morons inflict on kids whose only crime was being born.
The 1989 framing device (which is, as far as I can determine, almost entirely fictional) shows Rex and Rose Mary have learned nothing from having all of their children abandon them. Rose Mary gives Jeannette condescending lectures about her life, all while wolfing down food that Jeannette has paid for (she even tries to steal some off Jeannette’s plate). Rex bullies Schmidt from New Girl into an arm wrestling contest and, when he loses, punches him in the face.
So, OK, you’re probably thinking, this is a movie about terrible people who did terrible things? What’s so offensive about that? Are you trying to say that art should sanitize life and stories can’t be honest about abusive behavior and people? Depiction doesn’t mean endorsement, you know.
Except, in this case, it does. It really, really does. Without getting into spoilers-
You know what, fuck it, I’m going to spoil it. Rex and Rose Mary crash Jeannette’s engagement party because they’re hoping to shake Schmidt from New Girl down for literally a million dollars (it also comes out that Rex and Rose Mary have been sitting on land holdings that could have been worth lots of money, which means the poverty and starvation the kids were subjected to was entirely self-imposed by their parents because…society, I guess). Jeannette finally lets both of these leeches have it, tearing into them for all their heinous actions throughout her life.
And then…and then there’s a bunch of scenes of people telling Jeannette that she went too far. And then Woody Harrelson gets sick so everyone lectures Jeannette about how she owes it to Rex to make peace with him. And then there’s flashbacks to Rex helping Jeannette pay for college at a low moment (she was only broke because earlier he stole all her money) and to when he made her feel better after she was burned (SHE WAS ONLY BURNED BECAUSE HER PARENTS WERE NEGLECTFUL FUCKHOLES) and then suddenly Brie Larson is running through the streets while the music swells and we see flashbacks to Woody Harrelson and young Jeannette happily running side by side through gorgeous green fields and then Brie Larson cries as she talks to Woody Harrelson and asks his forgiveness and fuck this fucking movie.
Again, there’s an argument to be made that the movie is aware of how fucked up all this is and wants you to feel disgusted or at least conflicted about Jeannette’s final choice. But that’s not how this turn is presented by director Destin Daniel Cretton. In fact, The Glass Castle exalts Rex’s ‘non-conformist’ lifestyle. The movie agrees with him that Jeannette’s job as a columnist is bullshit, and it clearly supports Rex’s contention that she would be better off without Schmidt from New Girl, who The Glass Castle relentlessly tries to position as the apotheosis of late ‘80s douchery (this, despite the fact that he is endlessly kind and loving towards Jeannette. His only flaws, that we see, are that he has tacky taste in furniture and that after Woody Harrelson punches him in the face for no reason whatsoever, he tells Jeannette he doesn’t want to spend any more time with Woody Harrelson. What an asshole, right?).
The Glass Castle spends 90 minutes rubbing your face in an endless sequence of traumas begat against children (by the time we get to actual sexual abuse [not committed by the Walls parents, but facilitated by them being negligent shit-for-brains] I was ready for the movie to be done) then expects the audience to somehow accept that, wait, actually, aren’t these delusional, narcissistic dipshits actually special snowflakes who see right through the lies of, like, society? Wasn’t it so special and magical to have such an unconventional childhood? Isn’t being neglected and abused as a child actually a gateway to being a strong-willed and successful adult?
Ugh.
Even if the choices regarding the thematic material weren’t so outright reprehensible, The Glass Castle would still be a miss. Like many adaptations of memoirs or biographies, it struggles with how to turn the sprawl of a life into the coherence of a story. The result is a film that is endlessly episodic, and since those episodes consist almost entirely of children being emotionally traumatized or physically abused (if not both), it gets really wearying really quickly. At a certain point, The Glass Castle runs out of ways to shock you, and at that point it becomes a matter of running out the clock.
The cast is largely above reproach, save from a general sense that all involved should have known better. Larson is one of the best actresses of her generation, and she tries as hard as she possibly can to earn the manufactured grace notes foisted onto her by this script. It’s not her fault. Nor is it the fault of Harrelson or Watts, both of whom attack their roles without ego or shame. Harrelson strains to find something empathetic in Rex (the film suggests fairly explicitly that he is himself a victim of childhood abuse, with his worst outbursts as the result of the guilt and self-loathing that comes with that), but it’s too much of an ask. You cannot subject an audience to this tonnage of horror and expect all be to forgiven because you put together some decent compositions and found actors who can cry convincingly.
In conclusion: Fuck this movie.
The Glass Castle is now available on DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD.