The Glass Castle Book Vs Movie Essay

The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls was released in 2005. The movie was released December 7th, 2017, and was based upon that memoir. The screenplay writers were Destin Daniel Cretton, Marti Noxon, and Andrew Lanham. Unlike many others, I was impressed with the movie as a whole. The movie does not exactly line up with the memoir, but the movie gives sufficient visuals for what Jeannette and her siblings endured. The characters lived up to their roles for the most part which gives support to the movie. There are a few scenes missing in the movie version, but the scenes that are included do justice for portraying Jeannette’s experiences to her readers.

In the book, Jeannette is taught to swim by Rex shortly after “he announced that we were going swimming at the Hot Pot” (65) which was a natural sulfur spring in the desert in their town. In the movie, Rex humiliates Jeannette in

their neighborhood pool when he tried to teach her a lesson as well as how to swim. Rex threw Jeannette in the water a total of three times in the book and movie.

When he initially gets in the water he tells Jeannette “‘you’re going to learn to swim today’” (65) and then tells her “‘Sink or swim!’” (66) after throwing her in the second time. In both forms of media, Jeannette gets mad at her father and starts swimming as a result from trying to get away from him. These scenes are parallel in the book and movie. The book and movie both include Rex turning this incident into a learning experience when he kept telling her “you can’t cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is ‘if you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim’” (66). The scene is portrayed effectively in the movie, the only difference being the setting of the scene. The setting is important in the book because it illustrates how Jeannette’s parents are not the most level-headed people for wanting to go swimming where “the water was warm to the touch and smelled like rotten eggs… some people around Battle Mountain said the Hot Pot had no bottom at all, that it went

clean through the center of the earth” (66). However, the only difference between the book and movie for this scene is the setting, the central premise and theme of the scene is not affected in the adaptation to the movie. As Jenn Doll says in The Atlantic, “There are a million ways for the movie to go wrong, the most dangerous, perhaps, being a dilution of the initial concepts that got the readers so excited about the books in the first place”. The initial concepts in The Glass Castle were not affected in this scene, only where it took place, which is rather unimportant because we got a sense of what Jeannette was trying to portray to her readers and the plot was unaffected. The book and movie have parallels with the plot, tone, mood and characterization, the only contrast being the setting.
Many teachers question if they should show this movie along with the completion of the book because of the adaptations between the book and movie. I believe the movie should be played because holistically, the movie illustrates the childhood of Jeannette Walls and her siblings effectively. There are differences between the book and the movie, but are subtle enough that the movie is not completely thrown off by it. The central premise of the book is upheld by the movie.