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Film Review Of Jeannette Walls The Glass Castle

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The Glass Castle is an eye opening experience about the bonds between family and how much one can take from their family. The Glass Castle tells the story of Jeannette Walls, the second oldest of four children, and their struggle of growing up in a nomadic and illegal lifestyle. The patriarch of the Walls family is Rex Walls, a drunken yet brilliant ex-Air Force pilot who loves his children almost as much as he loves hitting the bottle. The matriarch of the Walls family is Mary Rose, a starving artist who would rather focus on her art than her children’s dinner. Throughout the entire novel we see acts of Rose Mary’s selfishness “Mom had us climb on top of the roof of the car a pull down tufts of spanish moss” (130). Both of them together …show more content…

It provides a profound window into one of the most incredible stories to ever be told. As a reader you feel like a silent member of the family as Jeanette describes the events in such vivid detail and emotion. The raw emotion you feel from the words on a page are amplified tenfold as the movie brings the novel alive. The brilliance from the movie shines in the director’s choice of cuts, shots and music selection. A problem that most books turned novel is that the director tries to make the movie their own as opposed to building the movie on the foundation the book has already provided. Destin Daniel Cretton does an immaculate job of building upon the book, keeping the unfiltered emotion and rawness of Jeanette’s upbringing alive. He brings the book to life and shows you the reality of the Walls family, he shows the abuse, he shows the alcoholism, he shows the fights, he shows the selfishness of the parents and the unfairness of being Rex’s and Rose Mary’s children. The movie does not filter or squander on the details. It is the raw emotion the movie brings out of the reader that makes the movie and book so great. In the scene when the Walls arrive in welch they are greeted by Rex’s parents and brother. Rex and his brother are shown drinking moonshine at the dinner table, it is in the dinner scene that you truly see how broken Rex is on the inside and how

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