Harrelson's erratic father figure highlights transparent 'Glass Castle'
In the biographical drama "The Glass Castle," Jeannette Walls' father Rex says he'll build his family's dream home, a glass castle, a long way from cities so everyone can see the stars through the transparent ceilings.
Dad sits down and draws up impressive floor plans for his architectural marvel, one that he never builds.
Instead, the hole he digs for the foundation soon becomes a trash pile, heaped with old junk, rotting food and discarded dreams.
"The Glass Castle" is nothing if not a splendid place to house clever metaphors.
Like last year's critically lauded drama "Captain Fantastic," Destin Daniel Cretton's "Glass Castle" - based on Jeannette's memoir - explores the mixed emotions and vacillating cost/benefit ratio that come with being raised by a supersmart father at war with how the world really works.
The always watchable Brie Larson - reuniting with her "Short Term 12" director Cretton - plays Jeanette, a successful New York gossip columnist based on the former MSNBC.com reporter and best-selling author.
Larson's Jeannette appears stable, smart, in-control, but her facade hides a traumatic, nomadic childhood in which she and her family - parents, two sisters and a brother - constantly moved to stay ahead of the law and creditors.
Rex, played with acidic affection by Woody Harrelson, struggles with alcoholism and a chronic case of dropping the ball of life. His amateur painter wife Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) serves as his chief enabler, buying into his erratic behavior and delusional ideas with a devotion beyond reason.
In one of numerous flashbacks, little Jeannette (a charismatic Chandler Head) asks Mom to prepare a meal. She refuses to leave her easel and asks which is more important: mere food or a painting that will last forever?
So, Jeannette climbs up on the stove and catches her dress on fire, horribly scarring her abdomen and creating an apt metaphor for the trauma of her childhood.
Harrelson proves to be a more convincing Rex when he's a howling wild man, not so much a thoughtful intellectual. Wisely, Harrelson refuses to allow Rex Walls to lapse into simple villainy. He is, as we are often reminded, a brilliant thinker, but unable to stick with any job or responsibility. His parenting methods border on cruelty, but they come from a strange place of authentic love.
Later in life, a maturing Jeannette reflects on how having the controlling, inspiring, crazy and inadvertently abusive Rex as her dad molded her into the woman she became.
"You were born to change the world!" Rex thunders, "not to add to the noise!"
Jeannette eventually marries Max Greenfield's pleasant but unworthy banking executive despite her parents' disapproval. (You can tell it's a bad match because Jeannette goes from the warm, earthy, inviting sets of her early years to the austere, sterile environment of her pricey New York apartment framed in formal Kubrickian symmetry.)
Cretton builds up a good deal of dramatic credibility in "The Glass Castle," only to have it undermined by generic and artificial epiphanies more suited to Lifetime Channel melodramas than this sincere approximation of realism.
Even Larson's spot-on, high-school-to-professional-career performance arc can't cover for Dad's behavior here.
“The Glass Castle”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Naomi Watts, Sarah Snook, Max Greenfield
Directed by: Destin Daniel Cretton
Other: A Lionsgate Films release. Rated PG-13 for language, smoking. 127 minutes