The Glass Castle Movie Vs Book

The Difficult Situation that comes with Comparing The Glass Castle Book to the Movie
“The Glass Castle” based of the memoir written by Jeannette Walls, the movie was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, and the writing credits include Cretton, Andrew Lanham, and of course Jeannette Walls. Released on August 13th, 2017, twelve years after the memoir was published. When I was told we were reviewing the movie version of “The Glass Castle” I was hesitant on being amazed by it, this is due to movies are never exactly like the book. The Atlantic released an article titled, “The Trouble with Making Books We Love into Movies” and in it the explain why the people who read the book don’t always get what they want, stating, “The movie is the adaptation

for the mass market, more “mass” even than mass-market books” When reading a memoir, the imagination is a key factor of how one perceives the book; how they look, talk, their facial expressions, etc. When seeing the actors picked for the movies I was overall pleased, Woody Harrelson playing the alcoholic father was probably the best fitted character. The actresses Brie Larson, Ella Anderson, Chandler Head, who all played Jeannette, were all great picks for Jeannette also. Though the cast of the movie was a good fit, the overall movie had a fifty-fifty effect on me. The movie, in my opinion, did not portray enough of the book, which was disappointing, I felt as if they strayed from the actual story and skewed the timeline too much. However it was still a powerful movie that hit very close to home for me, still giving me a close connection to the movie.
Though I did not get the privilege of watching the entire movie in full I did get to view the ten key parts of the movie.

I think one of the most disappointing parts of the movie was when they decided to move to West Virginia, the screenwriters completely switch the order of events. Instead of them moving in with Rex’s mother they just move into the home they were supposed to find later in the memoir due to getting banished, Rex explaining to the children “you did wrong.. And now we’ve all been banished” (pg 149), it was a powerful scene and it was left out. The movie also does not portray the extremely poor conditions they were surrounded by; instead of the walk and observation of the poor conditions in the memoir it was replaced with a car drive up to the house, leaving details out like, “The houses up here were shabbier than the brick houses lower down in the valley. They were made out of wood, with lopsided porches, sagging roofs, rusted-out gutters, and balding tar paper or asphalt shingles slowly but surely parting from the under wall” (pg 150). When arriving to the house it is big and has an upstairs, which is the opposite of the memoir, which describes that, “Inside were three rooms, each about ten feet by ten feet, facing onto the front porch. The house had no bathroom…” (pg 153). And a significant fight from earlier in the book between Rosemary and Rex, where Rex may have or may not have tossed Rosemary out of a window, was thrown in at this part of the movie

which was harder to watch because at this point the children were much older and the neighbors who were watching in the memoir, did not exist in the movie. The one thing that was accurate of the movie was the family repairing the house together and the bunk beds they made that had cardboard beds, and it was pleasing to see them bonding. Since most of this scene was completely re-written, I think the actual tone and mood of not only this scene but also the whole movie. Due to them taking out the family getting kicked out of Erma’s home, the underlying mood of this scene was more hopeful than it was portrayed in the memoir. I feel as if this happened throughout the entire movie, which made it stressful to watch. If I came into the movie having never read the book, I would have been fine with how the story was told.
In terms of recommending this to a teacher, despite all the changes and problems I have with the film I still would recommend it being watched in class. This is a very good lesson on how tone and mood can be so drastically changed in a movie. As well as the film is a great movie to compare and contrast to the book. Overall it’s a great movie and I think it makes people more humble to their circumstances. Despite it being so different from the book the underlying message is still there and at the end of the day I think that’s what Jeanette Walls wanted to happen.