Brie Larson and Short Term 12 director Destin Daniel Cretton re-team for this drama based on Jeannette Walls' best-selling memoir.
A young girl is raised in a dysfunctional family who are constantly on the run from the FBI. Living in poverty, she comes of age guided by her drunkard, ingenious father (Woody Harrelson) who distracts her with magical stories to keep her mind off the family's dire state, and her selfish, nonconformist mother (Naomi Watts) who has no intention of raising a family, along with her three siblings. Together, they fend for each other as they mature on the unorthodox journey that is their family life.
It wants you to know that all this more or less really did happen; it also can't help but attempt to tie an emotional bow around the messiness of real life, and to offer a heartwarming thesis about a childhood that was clearly full of contradictions.
Full reviewCretton captures the incidents of Walls' childhood (too many of them, to be honest, as the film really ought to be half an hour shorter), but struggles to connect them to the grown woman Larson plays in the present.
Full reviewReflective and cumulatively poignant, Destin Cretton's The Glass Castle lays bare the utmost truth about families: You will eventually morph into your parents.
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Jeannette, the central voice and consciousness in the book, is an oddly blurred character on screen. And the film itself loses focus as it drifts toward the conventions of the coming-of-age story and the family-dysfunction melodrama.
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Harrelson ... thoroughly understands Rex from the inside, immersing himself in the role of this charismatic man in a way that allows us to see both how compelling and how dangerous a parent he was.
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Whatever its imbalances and flaws, the movie is sure to strike an emotional chord with the book's many fans as well as newcomers to the remarkable tale.
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