By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
“The Glass Castle” is a dysfunctional childhood recollection that makes the anti-Establishment patriarch “Captain Fantastic” (2016) look like a candidate for Father-of-the-Year. At least he never starved or tortured his children.
In Destin Daniel Cretton’s screen adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ 2005 best-selling memoir, Walls’ abusive, alcoholic father Rex is seen all-too-often through rose-colored glasses, or perhaps that’s Woody Harrelson’s colorful, manipulatively roguish interpretation.
Working as a Manhattan gossip columnist in the 1980s, riding in a taxi after a posh restaurant dinner with her financier fiancé (Max Greenfield), Jeanette Walls (Brie Larsen) spots her grubby, itinerant parents dumpster-diving on the Lower East Side. Which ignites a series of flashbacks.
Nomadic Rex and Rose Mary Walls were free spirits. An intelligent but self-destructive bohemian, Rex (Harrelson) was unable to hold a job or cope with authority, while self-centered Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) would rather paint than cook for her hungry kids. Which is why, as a 3-year-old, Jeannette suffered serious burns trying to boil hot dogs.
Living in extreme poverty in rural Welch, West Virginia, the Walls family eventually squatted in a shack without plumbing, heat or electricity, except when Rex hot-wired it from neighboring properties. To say the kids were neglected and malnourished is an understatement.
Instead of being resentful about her reprehensibly unconventional Appalachian upbringing, Jeanette Walls maintains that it made her and her three siblings resilient and self-reliant: “With a complicated childhood, you can either focus on the positive or the negative, and I chose to focus on the positive.”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t translate cinematically. As depicted by Cretton and co-writer Andrew Lanham, the impoverished Walls kids had perfect teeth, wore clean clothes and didn’t get sick. They’re rarely seen suffering or struggling, which contradicts the grim truth of Walls’ candid autobiography, diluting its emotional potency.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Glass Castle” is a slick, sanitized 6, succumbing to sentimentality.
Set in Brooklyn’s ultraorthodox Borough Park neighborhood, “Menashe” is about a Jewish widower (Menashe Lustig) who has lost custody of his beloved 10-year-old son, Rieven (Ruben Niborski).
According to strict Hasidic custom, the youngster cannot be raised by a single parent. He must live with a father AND mother, so Menache’s married, financially secure, judgmental brother-in-law, Eizik (Yoel Weisshaus), has become Rieven’s condescending guardian.
Rebellious Menashe is a portly, disheveled klutz who refuses to wear the traditional long, black coat and hat and carelessly fails to provide proper meals for Rieven when the boy does visit. He’s the epitome of the luckless “schlimazel.”
Although the Rabbi (Meyer Schwartz) encourages him to remarry to provide an appropriate home in which to raise Rieven, Menashe doesn’t want a new wife. All he wants is his precious son.
Working in a small, kosher convenience store, Menashe’s earnings are meager, meaning he will be hard-pressed to host a proper reception in his tiny apartment after the Memorial for his late wife Leah, who died a year ago. But that’s something he’s determined to do.
Loosely based on actual events in Menashe Lustif’s life, documentarian Joshua Z. Weinstein, working with co-writers Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed, has fashioned a gentle, unconventional character study, offering an intimate glimpse into the cultural mores and manners of the Hasidim, punctuated by a subtly melancholy, even haunting musical score.
Already recognized as a comedian on YouTube, this is Menashe Lustig’s first foray into drama — and he’s a natural, evoking memories of Ernest Borgnine in “Marty.” Indeed, all of the actors, except one, are practicing Hasidic Jews.
Mostly in Yiddish, on the Granger Gauge, “Menashe” is a sensitive 7, offering sympathetic insight into a self-segregated community.
In the scathing docudrama “Detroit,” Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of “The Hurt Locker’ and “Zero Dark Thirty,” depicts the civil unrest that rocked Detroit in the volatile summer of 1967.
It begins on July 23 when the police raid “The Blind Pig,” an unlicensed African-American bar located on the second floor of a printing company, inciting what came to be known as the 12th Street Riot.
A mob forms when partygoers, celebrating the return of two Vietnam War veterans, are herded into paddy wagons. Bottles are thrown, then bricks, as the mood of the crowd quickly escalates into looting and arson, punctuated by shouts: “Burn it down!”
That leads to a visceral confrontation at the seedy Algiers Motel, where seven black men and two white women are brutally humiliated, graphically tortured and abused by police officers, resulting in the deaths of three innocent youths.
Working from an unflinching script by her longtime collaborator Mark Boal and in-your-face cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, Bigelow tells the agonizing, provocative story from various, often conflicting perspectives.
There’s Philip Krauss (Will Poulter), an overtly racist police officer, seemingly based on 24 year-old David Senak, who was exonerated and placed back on duty after he shot and killed an unarmed looter during the riots, and Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega) is a factory worker moonlighting as a security guard.
Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) and Larry Reed (Algee Smith) are members of an R&B group called The Dramatics. Robert Greene (Antony Mackie) is an unemployed veteran. Julie Ann Hysell (Hannah Murray) and Karen Malloy (Kaitlyn Dever) are teenage hitchhikers from Columbus, Ohio.
Plus Aubrey Pollard (Nathan David Jr.) and Carl Cooper (Jason Mitchell), who fires a toy starter pistol out the window which alerts the Michigan State Police and National Guard, who think he’s a sniper.
On the Granger Gauge, “Detroit” is a sordid, sadistic 6, filled with so much excessive violence that it induces revulsion, emerging as exploitative, racial torture pornography.
(Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
