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

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