The Glass Castle

The Story

The Glass Castle chronicles the extraordinary and turbulent childhood of Jeannette Walls, who grew up with her three siblings under the care of deeply unconventional and dysfunctional parents. The film alternates between Jeannette's successful life as a New York City gossip columnist in the 1980s and her impoverished upbringing in the deserts of the Southwest and the mountains of West Virginia, where her brilliant but alcoholic father Rex (Woody Harrelson) and her free-spirited artist mother Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) raised their children with a chaotic mix of adventure, neglect, and unfulfilled promises.

Between Memory and Forgiveness

The narrative structure moves fluidly through time, as adult Jeannette (Brie Larson) confronts the ghosts of her past while preparing to marry a wealthy man whose privileged background stands in stark contrast to her own origins. When her homeless parents unexpectedly appear in Manhattan—living as squatters and scavenging through dumpsters—Jeannette faces a crisis of identity: how to reconcile her new life with the painful memories and complex love she still holds for the family who simultaneously neglected and inspired her.

At the story's heart is Rex Walls' titular promise: to build his children a magnificent "glass castle" powered by solar energy and filled with wonders—a dream that never materialized but represented his vision of a better life. The film explores themes of poverty, resilience, forgiveness, and the complicated nature of parental love through Jeannette's journey to understand and ultimately accept her parents on their own terms.

Cast & Crew

The film features powerhouse performances from Oscar-winning and nominated actors bringing Jeannette Walls' family to vivid, complex life. Director Destin Daniel Cretton assembled a cast capable of portraying both the charm and the damage inherent in the Walls family dynamics.

Behind the Camera

Destin Daniel Cretton directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Andrew Lanham, adapting Jeannette Walls' 2005 memoir that spent more than three years on the New York Times bestseller list. Cretton, known for his empathetic approach to stories about damaged people seeking redemption (as demonstrated in Short Term 12), brought sensitivity and nuance to the potentially sensationalistic material.

The production team included cinematographer Brett Pawlak, who captured both the harsh beauty of the American Southwest and the claustrophobic poverty of Welch, West Virginia. Composer Joel P. West provided the emotional score, while production designer Meghan C. Rogers meticulously recreated the stark contrast between Jeannette's impoverished childhood environments and her polished Manhattan adult life.

Producers included Gil Netter (Life of Pi), Erik Feig, and Jeannette Walls herself, who maintained creative involvement to ensure the adaptation honored the truth of her story while making necessary cinematic adjustments.

Production & Adaptation Journey

Twelve Years from Page to Screen

The journey to adapt The Glass Castle for film began almost immediately after the memoir's 2005 publication, but finding the right creative team took over a decade. Jeannette Walls was fiercely protective of her story, particularly concerned about how her parents—especially her father—would be portrayed. Early development stumbled as various screenwriters and directors struggled to balance the memoir's darker elements with its moments of beauty and the complicated affection Walls maintains for her parents.

The project found its direction when Destin Daniel Cretton became attached in 2015. His previous work on Short Term 12, which sensitively portrayed troubled young people and the adults trying to help them, convinced Walls he could handle her story's emotional complexity without reducing her parents to caricatures or villains. Cretton spent extensive time with Walls and her siblings, gathering additional details and perspectives beyond what appeared in the published memoir.

Filming in the Real Welch, West Virginia

The production chose to film partially in Welch, West Virginia—the actual Appalachian town where Jeannette spent some of her most difficult childhood years. This decision brought authenticity but also controversy, as some longtime Welch residents felt the film portrayed their community negatively, emphasizing poverty and decline rather than resilience and community strength.

Production designer Meghan C. Rogers worked meticulously to recreate the dilapidated house on Little Hobart Street where the Walls family lived—a structure so damaged it lacked running water, heat, and at times, adequate food. The contrast between these scenes and the gleaming Manhattan apartment where adult Jeannette lives visually emphasizes her journey while raising questions about the emotional cost of escaping one's origins.

"The Glass Castle is not a house. It was a blueprint. It was hope in the form of a dream. And when that hope died, it stayed alive in me." — Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls' Bestselling Memoir

Published in 2005 by Scribner, Jeannette Walls' memoir The Glass Castle became an immediate bestseller, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for over 261 weeks (more than five years). The book sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and has been translated into 29 languages, becoming a staple of book clubs, high school curricula, and college courses.

Walls wrote the memoir after years of hiding her background from colleagues in the New York journalism world. Working as a gossip columnist for MSNBC.com and contributing to New York Magazine, she lived in fear that someone would discover her parents were homeless and living in Manhattan. When a colleague spotted her talking with her mother on the street, Walls decided to write her story rather than continue the exhausting work of concealment.

The memoir's success stemmed from Walls' unflinching honesty about her childhood combined with her refusal to simply condemn her parents. Rex Walls emerges as a complex figure—brilliant, charismatic, and deeply loving when sober, but destructive and unreliable when drinking. Rose Mary Walls appears equally contradictory: a talented artist and former teacher who valued her creative freedom above her children's basic needs yet genuinely believed she was giving them valuable life lessons about self-sufficiency.

The Real Rex and Rose Mary Walls

Rex Walls died in 1994, eleven years before his daughter's memoir revealed their story to the world. Rose Mary Walls, however, lived to see the book's publication and the subsequent film adaptation. By then in her 80s, she gave the project her blessing, though she maintained that Jeannette's perspective was just one interpretation of their unconventional family life.

Rose Mary insisted she never felt neglectful, arguing that she was teaching her children resilience and creativity. She continued living as she always had—pursuing her art, resisting conventional middle-class values, and accepting help from her children only reluctantly. This real-life continuation of Rose Mary's philosophy added poignancy to the film's themes: the Walls parents never changed, never apologized, never conformed—leaving their children to decide whether to accept them as they were or sever ties completely.

Critical Reception & Reviews

Rotten Tomatoes: 50% critics (205 reviews), 79% audience
Metacritic: 58/100 (mixed or average reviews)
IMDb: 7.1/10 (40,000+ ratings)

Critics' Consensus: "The Glass Castle fails to fully do justice to Jeannette Walls' acclaimed memoir, though its talented ensemble and the strength of its source material are often enough to make up for a certain lack of depth."

Reviews proved sharply divided. The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy praised the performances, particularly Harrelson's "career-best work as the charismatic, utterly unreliable Rex," while noting that "Cretton's sensitive direction keeps melodrama at bay." Variety's Owen Gleiberman appreciated the film's refusal to reduce Rex to a simple villain: "Harrelson makes him a man you want to believe in even as he breaks your heart."

However, The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave it 2/5 stars, criticizing the "overly tasteful approach that neutralizes the memoir's raw edges and harder truths." RogerEbert.com's Matt Zoller Seitz acknowledged the strong performances but argued the film "struggles to find a consistent tone, oscillating between inspirational triumph and family dysfunction without fully committing to either."

The most frequent criticism centered on the adaptation's perceived sanitization of the memoir's darkest elements—particularly scenes of genuine child endangerment and neglect—in favor of a more palatable, redemptive narrative. Some critics felt this betrayed the memoir's unflinching honesty, while others appreciated the film's more forgiving perspective as a valid artistic choice.

Box Office Performance & Audience Response

The Glass Castle opened in limited release on August 11, 2017, expanding gradually to over 1,400 theaters. The film grossed $17.3 million domestically and $4.8 million internationally, totaling $22.1 million worldwide against its modest $9 million production budget—making it a moderate financial success for a small-scale drama in an era dominated by franchise blockbusters.

Notably, the film performed significantly better with general audiences than critics, reflected in the 79% Rotten Tomatoes audience score versus 50% critical rating. This gap suggests that viewers who connected with the memoir's themes of resilience, family complexity, and forgiveness found emotional resonance the film's detractors missed. Many audience members praised the performances and the story's emotional authenticity even while acknowledging the adaptation's imperfections.

Themes & Interpretation

The Glass Castle explores the complicated territory between victimhood and agency, asking whether children raised in chaos and poverty can fairly be expected to forgive parents who failed them—particularly when those parents never apologize or change. The film doesn't provide simple answers, instead presenting Rex and Rose Mary as fully human: damaged, selfish, and neglectful, but also creative, loving (in their fashion), and genuinely opposed to the conformity they saw destroying spirits around them.

The titular glass castle functions as a powerful metaphor for broken promises, deferred dreams, and the gap between a parent's vision and reality. Yet the film suggests that Rex's impossible promise wasn't entirely empty—it represented his genuine love for his children and his desire to give them something extraordinary, even if alcoholism and instability prevented him from delivering.

The narrative also examines class and shame, particularly through adult Jeannette's attempts to distance herself from her origins. Her polished Manhattan life represents achievement but also denial; her parents' appearance in the city forces her to confront whether she can truly be herself while rejecting the past that formed her. The film ultimately argues for radical acceptance: seeing people—even deeply flawed parents—as they are rather than demanding they become who we need them to be.

Planning Your Viewing Experience

The Glass Castle is a film that rewards thoughtful viewing in an optimal environment where its emotional nuances and visual storytelling can be fully appreciated. Whether you're planning a solo viewing, book club movie night, or family discussion session, creating the right setup enhances the experience.

Creating an Optimal Home Theater Setup

For viewers seeking a cinematic experience at home, the film's careful cinematography and intimate performances benefit from quality projection. A Projector Calculator helps determine ideal projector placement and screen size based on your room dimensions and projector specifications. The film's widescreen aspect ratio and carefully composed shots—particularly the sweeping desert landscapes contrasted with claustrophobic interior spaces—truly shine when viewed on a properly sized screen that allows the visual storytelling to work as intended.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton and cinematographer Brett Pawlak used visual contrast throughout the film: the vast openness of the Southwest versus the cramped poverty of West Virginia, the warm golden tones of childhood memories versus the cooler palette of adult Jeannette's Manhattan life. These visual choices communicate emotional themes as powerfully as dialogue, making proper viewing setup more than mere technical concern—it's about experiencing the film as its creators envisioned.

Coordinating International Viewing & Discussion Groups

Given the memoir's global readership and the film's international availability on streaming platforms, many book clubs and discussion groups coordinate viewing sessions across different time zones. For groups spanning multiple countries or continents, proper time conversion ensures all participants can watch simultaneously or schedule follow-up discussions at mutually convenient times.

Whether you're coordinating with family members in different regions, organizing a virtual book club discussion after a group viewing, or planning an academic screening for students across international campuses, accessing comprehensive timezone resources helps ensure everyone knows exactly when to join. The film's 127-minute runtime requires planning—particularly for groups wanting to watch together and immediately discuss—so precise time coordination prevents confusion and maximizes participation.

Many educators use The Glass Castle in courses on memoir writing, poverty studies, family psychology, and American literature. International academic programs particularly benefit from synchronized viewing schedules that allow students in different locations to watch the film before virtual seminar discussions, making timezone conversion tools essential for modern distance learning.

Legacy & Cultural Impact

While The Glass Castle didn't achieve blockbuster status or unanimous critical acclaim, it serves an important role in the ongoing conversation about poverty, parenting, and the American Dream. The film arrived during increasing national discussion about economic inequality, intergenerational trauma, and the mythology of bootstrap self-reliance—themes central to Jeannette Walls' story.

The adaptation also contributed to the broader "difficult memoir" subgenre in film, joining works like Wild, Hillbilly Elegy, and Educated (in development) that explore how individuals transcend traumatic childhoods. These films raise complex questions about personal responsibility, systemic poverty, mental health, and whether sheer willpower can truly overcome structural disadvantages.

For Destin Daniel Cretton, The Glass Castle represented a stepping stone between intimate indie films and major studio projects. His empathetic approach to broken people and damaged families would later inform his work on Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), which similarly explored complicated father-son relationships and the challenge of accepting parental imperfection.

The film's most lasting contribution may be its humanization of homeless parents and children in poverty. By presenting the Walls family as complex individuals rather than statistics or cautionary tales, the adaptation (like the memoir) challenges viewers to see beneath surface judgments about poverty and unconventional families—recognizing both the real harm of neglect and the survival of love even in deeply dysfunctional circumstances.

Companion Reading & Viewing

For those moved by The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls published a follow-up memoir, Half Broke Horses (2009), which tells the story of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith—a woman whose frontier resilience and unconventional spirit clearly influenced Rose Mary Walls. This "true-life novel" provides additional context for understanding the Walls family's values and choices.

Walls also wrote a novel, The Silver Star (2013), about two sisters abandoned by their mother, drawing on similar themes of childhood resilience and sibling bonds forged through adversity.

Thematically related films include Room (2015, also starring Brie Larson), which explores mother-child bonds formed in traumatic circumstances; Captain Fantastic (2016), examining unconventional parenting from a different angle; and Short Term 12 (2013, director Cretton's breakthrough), which sensitively portrays young people recovering from family trauma.