Late in The Glass Castle, which is predicated on Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about rising up in a rootless and extremely dysfunctional household, Jeannette (Brie Larson) will get into an argument together with her homeless, alcoholic father, Rex, when he exhibits up unexpectedly at her engagement occasion in New York City. Rex disapproves of her highfalutin way of life and her wealthy fiancé, however he desires to borrow some cash. After all, he says, they’re household. “We were never a family,” she shouts at him. “We were a nightmare!” And for the primary two-thirds of director Destin Daniel Cretton’s movie adaptation, Walls’ nightmare is vividly dropped at life. It’s a heartbreaking, generally brutal, however at all times fascinating journey, anchored by a never-better Woody Harrelson as Rex, and by Ella Anderson’s haunting, veracious efficiency because the preteen Jeannette. Unfortunately, the script by Cretton and Andrew Lanham fails to stay the touchdown, serving up a pile of sentimental slop within the movie’s closing reel. It all results in a misguided joyful ending that feels as hole as Rex’s unending guarantees to offer for his household.

The Walls youngsters are basically introduced up as nomads. Rex, self-taught and guide good, is a persistent alcoholic and negligent father who by no means holds a job for lengthy. He drags his spouse and 4 children throughout the nation from one dilapidated shack to the subsequent at any time when invoice collectors or the regulation are scorching on his path. His household typically go with out meals, electrical energy, indoor plumbing, or medical care. And he’s apt to place them in hurt’s approach, as when he urges a teenage Jeannette to flirt with a person in a bar so he can hustle the sucker at pool; later, the person tries to rape her. When he’s sober, Rex spends a substantial amount of his time drawing an elaborate blueprint for a glass citadel he tells his youngsters he’s going to construct them sometime. Sadly, Rex by no means commits to something besides ingesting. Meanwhile, his spouse Rose Mary (a positive Naomi Watts) is a free-spirited artist who places portray forward of caring for her children. The Walls ultimately find yourself in Rex’s hometown of Welch, WV, and at last put down some roots once they transfer right into a ramshackle home there—though the youngsters are already plotting their escape once they’re sufficiently old.

The Walls’ sorrowful story is advised by way of flashbacks, because the grownup Jeannette remembers her powerful upbringing and tries to maintain her well-heeled colleagues in Manhattan from discovering her household historical past. Larson, so memorable in her Oscar-winning efficiency in Room, is a supporting participant for a lot of The Glass Castle. It’s solely within the story’s latter levels that her position turns into extra outstanding, and, sorry to say, these scenes are the least convincing. The filmmakers are unsparing in displaying us Rex’s instability, callousness, and alcohol-fueled rages for the nice majority of the film. But ultimately when Rex lays dying, they try and whitewash his habits and make us imagine that he wasn’t actually all that unhealthy. We’re reminded that he had his good moments, too, as Jeannette replays a few of them in her head. Well, sure, he did, however these few incidents can by no means erase the heartbreak and horror he introduced upon his household—or the viewers. It’s commendable that Jeannette reaches a spot of unconditional love for her dad, however as offered right here it feels contrived.

The Glass Castle would have been simpler if it had concentrated solely on Jeannette’s childhood and teenage years, and advised her story chronologically. The uplifting ending would come when Jeannette flees Welch and escapes to New York, the place we’d study, by way of onscreen textual content, that she graduated from Barnard College with honors and have become a profitable columnist and writer. Of course, that film probably wouldn’t have starred Brie Larson. It appears unusual to say, however a Larson-less model of The Glass Castle would have been the higher method to go.