If you follow my youtube channel you know I saw The Glass Castle last night and absolutely hated it. I must admit I don’t feel like I have the energy to hash out all the reasons I didn’t like it again, so please watch the video. However, I will give you a few.
The Glass Castle is based on a popular memoir by Jeannette Walls. It tells the story of her horrible childhood and what it was like to grow up with an abusive alcoholic father.
Unfortunately this movie seems to only half understand that. Instead Woody Harrelson as the father is often portrayed as a dreamer who wants to give his kids the stars and push them to a higher, better way of life.
This message is compounded by cutting back and forth to modern day Jeannette as played by Brie Larson. The film clearly judges her for being engaged to a yuppie man in finance and having the trappings of wealth. She is lectured to on numerous occasions about how she isn’t living up to her true potential.
I guess she should be more like her father who tells his young son that he needs to grow up and be a man after being sexually assaulted. Or when he gets drunk and allows his kids to go without food for 3 days. Or when he holds their mother out of a 2 story window by her neck. Isn’t it great being a dreamer?
I get that destructive toxic people are complex and loving them is possible but the way this movie showed the two sides of the father really bothered me and the way it judged her for living a stable better life angered me.
Other people seem to be able to get something out of it and I respect that but it really offended me and I hated it. My friend who went with me felt the same way. Free thinking is a great thing but not at the expense of childhood and innocence lost. I will not applaud this type of horrible behavior.
At one point the mother says she should stay with the father because ‘he’s the only one who believed in my painting’. Free thinking and creative endeavors have thus become a cage which is as terrifying as anything shown in Room but this movie wants you to be inspired by it. Even the music seemed to say ‘celebrate the free thinker’ at the most horrific times. Heck no!
I can only speak for myself in my reviews and I hated this movie. I thought it was morally repugnant and disgusting and these parents belonged in jail not celebrated in any way.
It really made me mad and it is my worst movie of 2017
Overall Grade- F
