My friend Matt is always challenging me to write the story that makes me bleed. It’s the one that comes most viscerally from your gut, from your experience, from your life, from your sorrow, from your joy, from the thing that makes you tick and move forward at the same time. This film bleeds author Jeannette Wall’s life story allowing tandem past memories to engage with present conflicts.
This director Destin Daniel Cretton, who gave us Short Term 12 (2013), has a gift for telling those stories that hurt to tell.
Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts give the performances of a lifetime as they attempt to parent on the run from one temporary living situation to the next, one binge drink to the next, one family fight and hungry belly and life lesson to the next.
We ache with Brie Larson as she suffers and survives in her films like Short Term 12 (2013), Room (2015), and now in Glass Castle. Her character has changed her status in life and made it to New York as a writer, but her interactions with her homeless parents only force her to deal with the demons from her past.
It’s a true story about a girl whose love for her father transcends his poor parenting, his cruelty, his ever-brimming promises to build life into a perfect glass castle for those he loves most. The ebb tide flows in with her belief in him and out with disappointment and carries moviegoers on the journey of forgiveness as they learn alongside her what it means to be like the tree that has lets suffering make it stronger.
The heart was right. But the execution…abrupt and ill-conceived.
The actors, however, proved themselves professionals. Mary Elizabeth Winstead (best as Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim) and John Gallagher Jr. (from the beloved short-lived HBO series Newsroom and the perfect indie Short Term 12) cared that their roles were believable and strong. John Goodman obviously enjoyed playing the crazy bunker-builder. They seemed eager participants in what felt like an experimental suck-up film, each shot an attempted homage to JJ or Spielberg. But even that would have been nice had this not felt more akin to Shayamalan’s more recent tragedies.
It all felt forced, and left too many unsolved mysteries about the characters themselves: like the unsolved main issue of Michelle’s backstory and serious relationship on the rocks. Any real details about her Emmett in the hatch, oh sorry the bomb shelter. Man, good thing they barely had to redecorate the Lost set after Desmond set the place up. Aren’t they supposed to be hitting a button every 108 minutes?
If you wait for breadcrumbs to lead you to truth in this one, you’ll go hungry. They mean nothing in the end. (Wait. Maybe this IS another Lost finale.)
I don’t know. Maybe people don’t go to the movies to think. Maybe I’m alone in blaming sloppy writing / directing. Sure JJ may have paid for it, but his MO is to support up-and-comers. He’s walking in the footsteps of his mentor Steven (Spielberg) and helping the fledgling directors take wing. Unfortunately, this Icharus not only flies too close to the sun, he flies into it inviting strangers from outerspace back with him to take over our planet. After this film, you’ll wonder which is worse: crazies on earth or crude angry aliens.
The film offers sweet narration from the child’s perspective, from Jack on the day he turns five. He wakes up to greet the day and each object in Room: “Good morning Chair. Good morning Sink.” He and his mama exercise and wash clothes and bake a birthday cake. Almost all seems lovely from the boy’s eyes, but even he can see his young mother’s far off, wounded, fearful expressions. Her sorrow is not his yet. For that they are both grateful.
Everything shifts when Mama reveals her precious secret one day: there is World outside of Room.
Yes, they escape. It may be important knowing that before you watch a film like this. The painfully dark, horrifying concept of abduction is lightened only somewhat by escape as reentry takes as much if not more gumption for survival.
Hope is a strong word. Hope is weapon against despair. Hope grows, like the leaf on Room’s skylight that showed them seasons, change, future flight, and rebirth. There is life outside of Room. Goodbye Room. Hello World.
Splatter: on FILM 