The Walls family has many problems, but their biggest problem is that they do not know exactly what their problem is. Rex and Rose Mary, the parents, want to be free, and freedom for them means doing what they love, even at the cost of ignoring their children. They do not want to be part of a system and society that rejects and constantly criticizes them, so they distance themselves from others.
As Rex says at the beginning of the film, rich people want to live in fancy apartments but the city air is so polluted that they cannot see the stars. He is right, but his way to reach the stars causes trouble for everyone. That’s what the whole story is about. The tensions between parents and children.
The film The Glass Castle is based on a true story. The text that comes before the title, in the first few minutes, tells us that we will watch a story that happened in the real world. If this text came at the end, we would probably react differently and watch the story and the relationships between the characters from a different perspective. Now we keep repeating in our minds: were these conversations real? Or were the relationships between family members really like that? This background means the film itself is affected by the reality of the Walls family. This is an issue that arises for almost all biographical films, especially if they are made in Hollywood. And let’s not forget that the film is adapted from the book by Jeannette Walls, a former columnist.
One night, Jeannette Walls, after saying goodbye to her fiancé, sees her parents but ignored them. An hour earlier, she had showed a different image of her parents to strangers. This takes her to the past, when she was still a little girl and asked her mother for food. A mother who, as an artist, prefers to work on a painting that would last forever but not to make food that would not exist for another hour. A few minutes later, she got up, when Jeannette was burning and screaming, leaving a wound on her body forever.
The structure of the film has a back-and-forth time scheme. Jeannette, who is now planning to marry David and has become a journalist, delves into the past, especially her relationship with her father. A relationship that is mixed with love and hate.
Rex, the father of the family, avoids everything and had chosen a kind of lifestyle that keeps a distance from society and government. He would rather get Jeannette out of the hospital sooner than think about her health. He does not accept the way education is conducted in schools and universities because he believes that people are brainwashed and turned into something they are not. He wants to be free and wants to build a glass castle for his family, or in fact for himself, that runs on solar power. A house that does not need to pay bills and thus does not have to be accountable to anyone else.
Have they ever heard of responsibility? What is wrong with them?
Rex and Rose want to maintain their independence to the point where they totally ignore Rose’s $1 million inheritance and prefer to have hard times rather than provide what they and their children need.
Parents have their own logic. That is why they cannot admit their mistakes or do not consider them wrong at all. Rex threw his daughter into a swimming pool because he thought that was the best way for her to deal with fear and learn to swim. Jeannette hates being in situations she doesn’t like. Like any child, she wants to sleep safely in her bed at night, not wait all day for a father who was supposed to buy some food but later find him drunk and wounded, with no food. Even worse than that, she is forced to suture the wound on his arm.
The father is almost constantly drunk most days of the year, and his efforts to quit his addiction are in vain. The mother is similar. She paints one painting after another, but none of them are valuable. The contradiction between their professional activities and their goals and then their failure is tragic but at the same time funny, the audience wonders what has happened to this couple who cannot see reality. Have they ever heard of responsibility? What is wrong with them?
Rex is not an adult man with his wife and children. He is a child who never wants not to be bothered by anything, instead playing and enjoying life as he likes. A child in his thirties or forties who does not change for the rest of his life. Because they stole his childhood; he never had a childhood because he was abused by his mother.
Interestingly, Rex leaves his children with his abusive family for a few days, just to travel with Rose Mary and have fun. He does not seem to accept that his parents are unreliable and may do as much harm to them as they did to him. It is not easy for him to accept reality. It seems impossible.
Eventually, Rex has no choice but to return to his hometown, near his mother, and wants to build his dream home there. A house that would never be built and would be turned into a garbage dump a few years later.
Rex is always wrong, but he knows one thing well, and that is that he does not see happiness in fancy apartments and expensive jewelry and clothes. For this reason, he tells Jeannette that she is only pretending to be happy. It upsets Jeannette because she does not want to accept that her father is right, but in the end she breaks up with David and goes to her father, who is in his final days. She realizes that she can deceive others but not herself.
David tries to turn Jeannette into somebody she is not. But should she become someone else? Why not? Why not leave the past and have a rebirth?
Jeannette’s living conditions can happen to anyone and it is in these situations that we ask ourselves whether we would have had a better life, had things been different. But who can say for sure? Maybe if Jeannette had lived in a comfortable house with fancy stuff, she would have been a spoiled girl. Questions that always remain unanswered. This is where she learns to let go of the past. Those situations were hard, unbearable and irritating, but whatever happened, remembering those moments is of no use to her and only makes her more tired. She learns to accept her past as it is and is no longer be ashamed to show who her real parents are.