The Glass Castle

"The Glass Castle" proves how difficult it is to translate a story from one medium to another, especially when filmmakers attempt to convert memoir into drama.

The film starts out with all the right ingredients - a bestselling memoir by Jennette Walls, a talented director, and a stellar cast, but attempting to distill a complex family into 127 minutes is a different matter.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton and lead actress Brie Larson have made magic in the past with "Short Term 12." Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts almost guarantee success. But they weren't able to draw a convincingly dramatic arch as they put together this story of the bridge from abuse to forgiveness.

Jennette (Larson) and her parents (Harrelson and Watts) live on dreams and wild, freewheeling ideas but not much else. They live in poverty and flee from one small town to another, avoiding the government and debt collectors. These aren't exceptional values for the 1960s and '70s, but all that changes when the girl grows up and try to cut out a career and for herself in the big city and the late 1980s. In this decade, the values are money, possessions, and success, all perfectly embodied in Jennette's new fianc�, David (Max Greenfield).

In a series of episodic remembrances, the fabled ant and grasshopper have their debate as Jennette fluctuates between the impoverished, artistic values of her parents and the stability of her new adult life.

Unfortunately, neither the bohemian or the hard worker make a convincing argument -so, being Hollywood, sentimentality and conformity win out in the end. The filmmakers attempt to condense a broadly scoped memoir into a movie narrative and end up with a messy message wrapped up with a bow.

This Blu-ray disc comes complete with nine deleted scenes and a host of special features, notably a behind-the-scenes featurette and an interview with the author of the memoir.

"The Glass Castle"
Blu-ray Combo Pack
$39.99
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