Back in the day, when Jeannette Walls was a glamorous gossip columnist for New York Magazine, sporting a French chignon and a white suit, she reported on Trump’s clandestine dates with Marla Maples when he was married to Ivana,but she had some secrets of her own. Her 2005 best seller, The Glass Castle, revealed a hillbilly upbringing with parents who were less than protective and nurturing. Let’s say, these disheveled “artists” were advocates of an alternative lifestyle in which they celebrated poverty, moved around in a junk heap of a car, one step away from authorities, where Jeannette and her siblings often went hungry as their father drank himself into a cruel stupor. But Rex Walls had big dreams; he wanted to build “a glass castle” of his own design. Now the popular memoir has been made into a fine, The Glass Castle, film directed by Destin Daniel Cretton who made the movie Short Term 12, a game changer for the young actress who plays Jeannette in the new film, the Oscar winning Brie Larson.
Highlighting key scenes in which Rex, appealing and appalling in the person of Woody Harrelson, teaches his children to own a star, and debunk capitalism, the movie moves back and forth in time showing Jeannette in various stages of her life. Particularly jaw-dropping is a scene in which young Jeannette (Chandler Head) boils water for hot dogs setting herself on fire; the accident leaves her body a maze of scarred flesh. Her artist mother, the gorgeous Naomi Watts gone frump, prioritized painting over feeding her kids.
This week, at a premiere party at a meatpacking space called Catch, Jeannette Walls exulted in the performances of three superb actresses portraying her at different ages; the middle Jeannette is Ella Anderson. Brie Larson, the adult Jeannette, embraced Oren Moverman who directed her in his 2013 Rampart, where Harrelson played her father too. He told me then that he knew she was a big star.
Jeannette Walls, tall and slender in an elegant white suit, told me the stylist wanted her to wear a bare midriff for the premiere. Clearly, she had not seen the movie.
A version of this post also appears on Gossip Central