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While reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, I fell in love with how the book was centered on Jeannette Walls’s real-life struggles. The one theme that stood out to me the most throughout the story was forgiveness. Even though Jeannette and her siblings were neglected on a daily basis as children, she harbored no hate for her parents and stayed optimistic as she reflected on the events that occurred in her past. The movie also captures this well in many different scenes. Many directors, however, find movie adaptations to be quite challenging since it is difficult to compress the plot and details of a whole book within a 2-hour movie, but that is something to be expected. Although these two works were based on the same story, they each have their own unique characteristics that set them apart from each other.
When watching the adaptation, book readers should be quick to point out many obvious and subtle changes from the original. One significant change that sets the movie apart from the book is the significant increase in appearances from Jeannette’s husband, David. Unlike in the book, David plays a major component in the main plot as the story progresses. For example, in the movie, there is a scene when the whole family gets together at Jeannette’s parents’ house.
Rex and David get drunk and have an arm-wrestling match to settle an argument they had. When David ends up winning the match, Rex punches him in the face. Rex does not accept David and thinks he is not right for his daughter. This scene was not in the book and may not even have actually happened, but this was the change that caught my eye the most as I was watching the movie. David’s increased appearances could be argued to be an unnecessary addition to the film but nonetheless, it made the movie more interesting and complex.
Another major difference between the book and the film is the sequence of events. The events that took place in the book were more of a constant chronological flow, unlike the latter. Throughout the movie, the perspective of Jeannette jumps back and forth from childhood to adulthood, which is something that I personally liked because we got to see more of her in her later years. The addition of events that triggered Jeannette’s flashbacks brought the audience to become more emotionally invested in the film. This can be due to the fact that only the viewers know the other half of her life that the everyday people she meets do not know; this causes the audience to feel that they have a deeper bond with Jeannette since they know her “secret”. Another added scene was when Rex got into a conflict with the lifeguard after he tried to teach Jeannette how to swim. In the movie, Rex punches him, which gives a reason as to why they moved to Welch, West Virginia. However, In the book, the lifeguard altercation never happens.
Despite their differences, these two works share the same key events and themes for the most part. In my personal opinion, both the book and the movie are great. The film captures the main themes perfectly as it shows Jeannette’s life struggles from the beginning. It does a great job visualizing the struggles that the Walls went through; even though the context of a lot of scenes was cut out, the film stayed focused and revolved around the key events. One of my favorite scenes to see being played out was when Rex, Jeannette’s father, was struggling as he was tied up in the bed trying to stop drinking because his daughter asked him to. During this scene, Rex is screaming and asking for help, showcasing how much he struggled to end his addiction and become a better father to his children.
Even though the movie was only 2 hours and the director couldn’t capture everything, he still showed how the Walls family struggled. It was great to see actual people play the characters, which made the visualization of the book a lot better in my opinion. The recurring appearances of the glass castle kept its significance throughout both works, which was a great choice because of its importance as Jeannette grew up. My interpretation of the glass castle was that it represented the stability of Jeannette’s family. The children and their father continuously added their hopes and dreams into the castle, but as they encountered issue after issue, the stability of their family, symbolized by the fragile castle, fell apart again and again.
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