Oh yeah? Wait’ll you hear about my dad! Feeling some sort of need to one-up the outrageous parenting tales of 2017, Daniel Destin Cretton Cretton Daniel Destin Destin Daniel Cretton chose The Glass Castle as his forum for “Hah! Beat that!” While Rex Walls (Woody Harrelson) may never have laid a finger on his wife or four children, one can’t help but find slack-jawed awe at the idea that a hovel in Upper Redneck, West Virginia without light, heat, water, or electricity represented a step up for the Walls clan.
Jeannette Walls (Chandler Head as a girl, Ella Anderson as a tween, and Brie Larson as an adult) lit herself on fire as a child. She didn’t mean to; she was six and boiling hot dogs, unsupervised. There is zero percent of this scene and its hospital follow-up, where dad skips out on the bill by abducting his half-healed child, that will make you feel good about the parenting involved. It’s hard to know where to start the critique – do we take mom (Naomi Watts) to task for allowing the girl to cook by herself? Truth is, dad supports the family so poorly it’s a minor miracle any of the six residents knows how to cook food at all. As if threatened by mom’s failure, Rex steps up the parental negligence by howling in the hospital, accusing a doctor of padding bills, and directing his son to stage an epileptic fit while he skips with Jeannette.
Stealing away ahead of minor law enforcement is one of Rex’s true gifts. The trick is always be ready to move and never commit a crime anybody will want to pursue you for, like punching a nice guy in the face. A reasonable man won’t chase you 
across two states to exact justice. Speaking of punching a guy in the face, this is how Rex treats Jeannette’s fiancé, David (Max Greenfield) when he isn’t actively trying to get David drunk. Rex is a whiz with people.
The film is told in two timelines, one present where adult Jeannette and David live the NYC good life while mom and dad squat in the lower east side. The other is the painful childhood of the Walls children. After moving to West Virginia, the family goes three full days without food. Desperate, the children chow on a mixture of butter and sugar removed from the lifeless refrigerator. Under pressure to act, dad collects the remaining money in the family coffer and, after promising a big meal, gets drunk. Ah, ok. This is the defining moment: dad is a human sink hole, always letting the family down. But wait. In the next scene, dad returns to his pipe dream, The Glass Castle he wants to build for his family. That’s who dad is, some sort of unprepared minstrel. But wait. Then dad … I’m sorry, this film is completely undermined by the sheer volume of defining moments.
Initially, Castle stresses dad’s intelligence, especially with respect to beating the system. The film comes across as sort of a poor man’s Captain Fantastic. However, while Cap’n Viggo Mortensen held some sort of ideological grip on his doting children, Woody’s children eventually learn independence out of necessity. It doesn’t matter what dad knows if he’s full of shit, y’know? Rex has four children and a doormat of a wife, but this film is essentially about the relationship between Rex and his fav, Jeannette. How far do you have to be pushed before you decide a parent who loves you to death is probably going to love you to death?
The Glass Castle is biographical, which makes sense because fiction is never this messy. The scenes are powerful, but work against one another. Cretton’s desire for poignancy undermines a cohesive thesis. While this is 
certainly human nature (people are rarely one thing or another), it makes it impossible to conclude a film like The Glass Castle; there is no possible ending of this film that won’t seem false on at least one or two levels. Like the Walls family itself, the sum of the parts of The Glass Castle is far greater than the whole.
Very quietly, Woody Harrelson is having a great year and I wish somebody besides me would acknowledge it. His 2017 roles in The Glass Castle, War for the Planet of the Apes, and Wilson are so distinctive and iconic that comedians all over this country are currently wondering if they’re big enough to mock. The odds that any of these roles will be recognized by televised award shows are very long, but if I still wrote the Year in Review, Woody would be current front runner for actor of the year.
The Walls had to move town to town
Because dad always acted the clown
Combative betraying
Yielded the saying
Glass castle monarchs shouldn’t throw down
Rated PG-13, 127 Minutes
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Writer: Destin Daniel Cretton & Andrew Lanham
Genre: Shitty childhoods
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Jeannette Walls
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: PTSD children of abusive parents
