Le château de verre

Cette adaptation du livre autobiographique de Jeannette Walls souffre d'un traitement mélodramatique qui alourdit un récit déjà tissé d'éléments difficiles (pauvreté, alcoolisme, maltraitance).

Même s'il aurait pu bénéficier d'un traitement cinématographique plus innovateur et surprenant, The Glass Castle crée chez le spectateur un inexplicable sentiment d'attachement profond.

Fort heureusement, le film bénéficie des performances magnifiques de Brie Larson (lauréate d'un Oscar grâce à Room), qui incarne le personnage de Jeannette à l'adolescence et à l'âge adulte, ainsi que de Woody Harrelson.

But the feature, which reunites the filmmaker with his Short Term 12 breakout star, Brie Larson, successfully captures the essence of the memoir, with exceptionally potent work by Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts as the spirited, self-involved and willfully impoverished bohemians who subjected their four kids to a peripatetic, hardscrabble life but also, in the process, taught them to fend for themselves.

Nevertheless, The Glass Castle is a strong, late-summer slice of life, and will likely be much-loved by fans of the book, or even just film-goers that want a big of a change from summer actioners.

Brie Larson reunites with her Short Term 12 director to play gossip columnist Jeannette Walls, whose childhood proved to be her best story.

That event is filmed in a terrifying single take by director Destin Daniel Cretton, with the camera going underwater to capture the frenzy of her experience. But too much of the plot is spun with vanilla, especially tacked-on scenes of Walls' starched careerist life in New York City with her Banker Boyfriend, presumably to engineer more screen time for the lead actress.

There's an abundance of talent on display in The Glass Castle, but the story of the Walls family never rises to the occasion and becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

It can be tough for someone in my position to admit that, sometimes, movies are just not up to a task.