People who live in glass castles might be wary of throwing stones. That clearly was not the case with American magazine journalist Jeannette Walls, who made of her often harrowing childhood a best-selling memoir that has found its inevitable way to the screen. A would-be Daddy Dearest with a hefty dollop of Captain Fantastic thrown into the mix, what would seem to be a star vehicle for recent Oscar winner Brie Larson is in fact pretty much dominated by Woody Harrelson as the fearsome paterfamilias who lashes out and loves in equal measure. Or does the first as a perverse way of expressing the second.
I actually knew Walls slightly during her formidable tenure at New York Magazine, where she was a gossip columnist on the rise and I was a journalism intern. Warm, engaging, and glamorous to a fault, the Walls with whom I intersected one long-ago summer gave no evidence of having been born into the nomadic, artistically minded but also largely dysfunctional family portrayed here. Director Destin Daniel Cretton's film may insist upon a glutinous ending, but the reality of events in the Walls household – or, more likely, the journey, as they set out once again on the road – was clearly far rougher and messier than so tidy-seeming a celluloid adaptation is prepared to acknowledge. 
There's nothing safe or reined-in about Harrelson's unbridled portrait of a man facing down personal demons, starting with drink, and clearly wanting to do right by his artist-wife (Naomi Watts, above left) and their numerous children, of whom young Jeannette would appear to be the most ambitious. There's tough love and then there's parenting that finds mum Rose Mary more interested in her latest canvas than in feeding her burgeoning family, who at one point take to dining on a mixture of butter and sugar in order to survive.
Harrelson's Rex, meanwhile, is an inventor and philosophe who spouts life-enhancing maxims – "You learn from living, everything else is a damn lie" – when he isn't teaching a young and terrified Jeannette to swim by dropping her this way and that into a pool. In thrall to a temper one sense frightens even himself, Rex justifies his actions as planting a fire in his daughter's belly, and if ever there were a case of success being borne out of rebellion, that scenario is on view here. Harrelson to his unceasing credit never soft-pedals behaviour that simply won't be confined. But just when the audience is putting its head in their collective hands alongside the onscreen Jeannette, Rex pulls himself up by his occasionally gallant rhetorical bootstraps, and you find glimpses of the visionary he might very well have been.
The flashbacks to the child-woman that is Jeannette, glimpsed alongside the parental bohemians who will in time join the ranks of New York's homeless, score pretty strongly throughout, leaving the contemporary sequences involving Jeannette's occupancy of 1980s New York society to land with a thud. We first encounter an indrawn Larson (pictured above) as the adult Jeannette fibbing her way through an important dinner alongside a boyfriend (Max Greenfield) who seems hardly worth the fuss (his arm-wrestling encounter with Rex seems too stagey by half), and it's surprising that so little is made of Jeannette in the hardscrabble magazine world workplace – an environment, one assumes, for which life with father might well have prepared her in its way.
From torment to triumph, or so Jeannette's life reads, at least in material terms. The truth, one imagines, is far more knotted, as family ties so often are.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Glass Castle
Milne is a successful playwright, screenwriter and novelist but PTSD makes him long for peace and quiet in the countryside, where he plans to write the definitive denunciation of war. Daphne’s not keen, but they move from Chelsea to Cotchford Farm, a gorgeous 16th century house near Ashdown Forest (Brian Jones bought the house in the Sixties and drowned in its pool). But the PTSD isn’t so easy to escape. “You’re a writer. Write,” commands Daphne when Blue’s away from his desk again. “I had a baby to cheer you up. Nothing’s enough for you.”
Witherspoon plays Alice, a putative interior decorator who also happens to be the daughter of an Oscar-winning director who has since died: hey, Freudian or what? On the outs from marriage to music biz mogul Austen (Michael Sheen), Alice has scooped up their two daughters and decamped from New York back to LA, where she readjusts nicely to life in the family manse, which happens to come with the kind of guest house that practically cries out to have three male 20somethings calling it home.
I'm not sure I know too many women of any age who would so readily allow long-term accommodation gratis to three blokes they met on a boozy night out, but then again, it doesn't hurt that the chaps' collective skills extend beyond the carnal to include the sorts of computer and handyman-related talents on which, I well realise, you really can't put a price. Throughout all this, the two young daughters seem blissfully untraumatised as one after another man hoves into view, Meyers-Shyer stretching to breaking point an ancillary plot point as to whether the sweet-seeming writer George (a genuinely appealing Jon Rudnitsky) will make it to the eldest child's self-penned school play on time. (Between this and Big Little Lies, Witherspoon seems to be drawn of late to celluloid ventures involving theatre: is she hinting at wanting to try some stage work herself?) 
They have one date in a disco so desolate that it looks left over from Soviet days, which ends badly when the concealed tail flops out on its own accord. Another time they attend a self-help group, but leave in hysterics at its overwhelmingly ponderous atmosphere (the attendees are a cast of those who have lost their way in life, vulnerable to any new psychic trend, as was indeed the case in Russia in the Nineties). In another nicely nuanced scene she visits a fortune-teller, trying to discover whether Petya’s attachment is serious. The answer to that comes in a night-time zoo scene late in the film, which desolately confounds her expectations even as it disorients ours. What way out can there be? Tverdovsky closes his film with an abrupt cut, as brutal as it is sudden.
Except in so much as it portrays a society in which the idea of anything like a “national ideology” is bewilderingly irrelevant – ironic, perhaps, that Zoology nevertheless received state funding – Tverdovsky’s film doesn’t engage with politics directly, in the way that Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan did so potently. Rather it leaves the impression that the sickness portrayed is an exclusively human phenomenon (which actually comes closer to what Zvyagintsev treats in his most recent film, this year’s Loveless). Such variations on alienation come up a lot in contemporary, loosely arthouse Russian cinema, often winning international festival acclaim (though not always UK distribution): Zoology took the Karlovy Vary special jury prize this year, and Tverdovsky’s feature debut Corrections Class was also a winner there in 2014.
Enyedi is laconic about all of that, and there’s certainly no playing-for-laughs in her depiction of Maria. But, unlikely though it may seem, comedy is not far away. When a theft is discovered from the slaughterhouse veterinary store – bovine aphrodisiac of all things, why it is there at all a typical story – procedure dictates that a psychiatrist (Réka Tenki, very sassy) be brought in to interview staff. No subject is off-limits for her questioning, from earliest sexual experiences to last night’s dreams.
