IMDb listing
Los Angeles Times (J. Walls) author's review of the process of making this film based on her memoir
CNS/USCCB (K. Jensen) review
Los Angeles Times (K. Turan) review
RogerEbert.com (C. Lemire) review
AVClub (C. Rife) review
The Glass Castle [2017] (directed and screenplay cowritten by Destin Daniel Cretton [wikip] [IMDb] as well as Andrew Lanham based on the memoir [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] by Jeannette Walls [wikip] [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] [IMDb]) is a film that will challenge many of its American Viewers (to say nothing of Viewers overseas, who'd struggle even more than American viewers for a sense of context).
After all, this is a film about a woman, Jeannette Walls (played in the film as a child by Ella Anderson, and later as a teen / adult quite excellently by Brie Larsen) who eventually became a successful GOSSIP COLUMNIST FOR THE NEW YORKER (!) who grew-up in a more or less OBVIOUSLY ABUSIVE non-Conformist yet also Catholic household IN APPALACHIA.
OMG non-Conformist, Catholic, Appalachia ... to many / most American Readers TODAY those three words would seem to be at the far extremes of some bizarre contemporary American ideological triangle. Yet, all is not what it would rigidly seem in today's American straight-jacketed cultural climate:
To begin with, while to many today Appalachia would seem to be exclusively the province of bearded and bonnet-wearing, moon-shine swilling still Evolution-denying Evangelical Protestant snake-charming descendants of the Catholic-hating Scots-Irish settlers (read Northern Irish Protestants) who crossed the Appalachian mountains -- eventually kicking out the Cherokees... -- to settle there in the early days of the Republic, many of those West Virginia miners whose jobs Hillary Clinton infamously and perhaps still prematurely foreclosed-upon are actually Catholics of Slavic -- Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian, Belorussian (back in the day called Ruthenian) -- descent. So there _are_ Catholics in them-thar-hills (and for some it'd be interesting perhaps to research the "contributions" of these vodka / slivovice drinking peoples to the moonshine culture of the region ;-).
Then while to many, especially non-Catholic, Americans today, the terms "non-Conformist" and "Catholic" would seem like complete / unfathomably polar opposites, that was NOT the case until at least the mid-late-1980s.
[Readers note here that in the mid-1980s, much to truly everybody's surprise, the Reagan Administration reversed two centuries of U.S. foreign policy to establish formal diplomatic relations with the Vatican (something that the Holy See desired for most of those 200 years). IN RETURN however, up until recently (changing back to the previous norm with the election of Pope Francis), the appointments of Catholic bishops in the United States (which _are_ made by the Vatican), have been ever more conservative ... So was there an informal deal made between the Reagan Administration and the Holy See at that time to change the composition of the US Catholic bishops in a more GOP / right-wing / Conservative friendly direction? After all, since the late-1980s and up until the election of Pope Francis, pretty much all that the Catholic Bishops in the U.S. have been known to talk about has been about abortion and homosexuality. In contrast, prior to that, in the early-mid 1980s, the U.S. Catholic Bishops made two very prominent statements one on Peace and the other on Economic Justice. So a case could be made that such an ever informal and always _deniable_ deal (in return for diplomatic recognition) was made ...].
However, be those "diplomatic / bishops appointment intrigues" as they may, one need only mention the names of people like Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and even Jack Kerouac (who, growing up in a Quebecois household in New York in the 1930s-40s was obviously influenced by the other two, as well as, of course, others like the more conventionally, non-Catholic / classically American writer John Steinbeck) and the "free-spiritness" of Jeannette's parents even as they came from Catholic upbringings no longer seems strange. A faint if persistent echo of that "radically free-ing" past in 20th century Catholic writing can still be found in the works of people like Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM [wikip] [GR].
However, "non-Conformity" especially when it comes to raising a family has its problems: Rules / social norms _often_ (not always, but _often_) have their basis in the practical experience of a culture (my point being here that rules should be neither blindly accepted nor out-of-hand rejected without serious critical reflection. Simply rejecting "old rules" out-of-hand negates the accumulated wisdom of a people and needlessly forces descendants to "reinvent the wheel" / "start from scratch"):
Yes, it _would have been_ "nice" from the perspective of Jeanette's parents Rex (played in this film to Oscar nomination worthy heights by Woody Harrelson) and Rose Mary (also played excellently by Naomi Watts) to simply live quite the "carefree lives" of beatnik Jack Kerouac or artist Georgia O'Keeffe, but THEY HAD KIDS that they were responsible for, and there are REPEATED instances in this story when VIEWERS are left simply stunned and wondering WHY their kids were not simply taken away from them.
And yet, they weren't (taken away), and that is probably _for the best_. Rex (and Rose Mary, for that matter) _were_ TERRIBLE PARENTS, but they were -- like all of us -- also _more_ than their (often clear enough) sins / failings.
I live and work very much in this world of complex _real people_. As such I applaud the honesty and complexity of the presentation. Otherwise, we'd be forced to watch / read simply sanitized versions of Pleasantville [1998] of one sort or another with the "good people" (idealized according to one or another au currant ideology) and "horned / tailed villains" clearly defined.
So then, this is a simply excellent if, often enough, _difficult to watch_ film and PARENTS NOTE thematically deserving of an R-rating rather than the silly PG-13 that it apparently received. This film would require an adult, at least in their mid to late 20s, in order to really understand it. Again, some of the situations, though I suppose _technically_ meeting "PG-13" criteria (technically no blood, nudity or gore), are very difficult to watch. EXCELLENT though it is, it is not for the squeamish.
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