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

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