The Glass Castle (2017)
I read The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls' memoir, back when my mother read it for her book club in 2008. I thought it was appropriately affecting, and the writing was fine, but it wasn't my favourite book - even though I don't mind media that dwells in its misery, but this particular book didn't strike the balance for me. All that considered, the movie adaptation was...faithful. It was well acted and well executed and a near completely faithful retelling of Walls' novelization of her youth.
Whether or not that's a good thing depends on how much you enjoy this kind of story. I'll cop to having a low tolerance for the kind of story that spans a lifetime, focusing in on moments of woe to show the extraordinariness of one person. I wish more focus had been given to the adult characters of Walls' siblings, so it felt perhaps less self-indulgent. Alternatively, I would have enjoyed it much more if the jumps between past and past-present hadn't been so abrupt - especially as Brie Larson begins portraying both the teenage and adult character of Walls and it becomes difficult to distinguish between the past and past-present (which I say, because the "present" of the film is the 80s, only discernible from the hair styles and occasional shoulder pad).
Larson does a good job anchoring the movie, but the real highlights come from the characters around her. Woody Harrelson essentially carries the movie with his dynamic, chaotic energy and Naomi Watts balances that with her quietly destructive energy playing his wife. I actually did also really enjoy the soft bits of comedy that were mostly brought on by Max Greenfield, of New Girl fame, and I wanted a little bit more of him to balance things out. I also think that the terror of echoing the actions of our parents is terrifying, and would have been something new and added to the film.
My real question with this movie is: what purpose did it serve? Was it just to expose more people to the story? I get that, but I feel like something else needs to happen. There needed to be an angle. It was a perfectly serviceable movie if you just wanted to feel kind of sad for a while, and the same moments got me as did in the book, but it was stopped from being a great movie by that. Perhaps I'd feel differently had I not read the book, but this is the same case as with a movie like Harry Potter or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - they have been so widely read that if you've considered the source material, you can't really view the movie independently. It becomes particularly obvious when there is so little to distinguish the two. Tiny factors here and there.
Rating: 5/10 - A totally fine movie, I suppose.
Whether or not that's a good thing depends on how much you enjoy this kind of story. I'll cop to having a low tolerance for the kind of story that spans a lifetime, focusing in on moments of woe to show the extraordinariness of one person. I wish more focus had been given to the adult characters of Walls' siblings, so it felt perhaps less self-indulgent. Alternatively, I would have enjoyed it much more if the jumps between past and past-present hadn't been so abrupt - especially as Brie Larson begins portraying both the teenage and adult character of Walls and it becomes difficult to distinguish between the past and past-present (which I say, because the "present" of the film is the 80s, only discernible from the hair styles and occasional shoulder pad).
Larson does a good job anchoring the movie, but the real highlights come from the characters around her. Woody Harrelson essentially carries the movie with his dynamic, chaotic energy and Naomi Watts balances that with her quietly destructive energy playing his wife. I actually did also really enjoy the soft bits of comedy that were mostly brought on by Max Greenfield, of New Girl fame, and I wanted a little bit more of him to balance things out. I also think that the terror of echoing the actions of our parents is terrifying, and would have been something new and added to the film.
My real question with this movie is: what purpose did it serve? Was it just to expose more people to the story? I get that, but I feel like something else needs to happen. There needed to be an angle. It was a perfectly serviceable movie if you just wanted to feel kind of sad for a while, and the same moments got me as did in the book, but it was stopped from being a great movie by that. Perhaps I'd feel differently had I not read the book, but this is the same case as with a movie like Harry Potter or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - they have been so widely read that if you've considered the source material, you can't really view the movie independently. It becomes particularly obvious when there is so little to distinguish the two. Tiny factors here and there.
Rating: 5/10 - A totally fine movie, I suppose.
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