The Glass Castle (2017) * 1/2

Directed by:  Destin Cretton

Starring:  Brie Larson, Woody Harrelson, Max Greenfield, Naomi Watts, Ella Anderson

The Glass Castle, a film adaptation of a 2005 memoir by Jeanette Walls, feels like a movie holding back.     It is only willing to go so far with its presentation of its alcoholic, selfish, abusive lout of a father, only to backtrack and try and present us with a "he wasn't so bad, after all," ending.    Baloney.  Horsefeathers.  Hogwash.  Bullshit.    The ending feels tacked on; trying desperately to end things on a pleasant note.    Why?    The guy was on the same likability wavelength as the father in Captain Fantastic, which is another movie about a borderline abusive father who, wouldn't you know, was just trying to teach his kids valuable lessons.     We are the idiots for not being able to recognize them.  

The film begins in 1989 Manhattan, where Jeanette (Larson) is a New York Times gossip columnist engaged to a nice yuppie named David (Greenfield) and living in a nice apartment.    Things are good, until Jeanette passes her parents in a taxi digging through a dumpster for food.    Turns out Rex(Harrelson) and Rosemary (Watts) enjoy the "freedom" of living like uncivilized human beings and prefer to wander the country like gypsies.    The wandering is out of necessity because Rex keeps losing jobs thanks to his drinking and he stays one step ahead of bill collectors and the authorities.    The couple squats in an abandoned building and chastises Jeanette for "not being true to herself" for wanting to marry David, whom Rex bullies.     I can't fathom how bad they smell from a life of living on the street.

We see numerous flashbacks to Jeanette's mostly miserable childhood, in which Rex spends all of the family's very limited income on drinking, while Rosemary stands by her husband and enables his terrible behavior.    The kids go days without eating.    In one gross scene, Jeanette's little sister eats butter with sugar mixed in since it is the only thing resembling food left in the house.    The family moves from shithole to shithole before settling for a while in Rex's hometown of Welch, West Virginia.    We meet Rex's parents, and learn quickly his mother was both verbally and sexually abusive to him.    That gives us a reason for Rex's behavior, although Jeanette points out to him, "It doesn't give him the right to act this way,"    Her delivery of the line seems perfunctory, because the movie itself seems to believe the abuse does indeed give him a right to act that way.

The wheels churn toward the predictable, inexorable conclusion.    We know Rex can't live like a prick and die like one.    The scales need to fall from Jeanette's eyes because somehow she is wrong for wanting her folks out of her life.    Rex and Rosemary aren't so bad.    We just need to be fair and walk a mile in their shoes before passing judgment.     The ending is unconvincing, dishonest, and lame; borne out of death scene clichés we've seen before and not anything borne out of someone's unique story.

It is hard to fault the actors, whom do top-notch jobs playing either the abused or the abuser.    I'm not really a book reader, but I may have to obtain a copy of the book and witness just how much Hollywood came in and turned it from an unflinching look at an alcoholic's destruction of his family to a movie which shoehorned in a sappy conclusion.