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The "Glass House's" Big Revelation: Mom and Dad's Friends Sure Are Weird! September, 2001 Here's my version of the "The Glass House" pitch: "Valley parents die in car wreck, leaving the two brats in the care of mom and dad's best friends and former neighbors, The Glass's, who've since moved into a fabulous, and gated, glass house (nudge, nudge) overlooking Malibu. These new guardians, it soon becomes clear, are not like mom and at all. Heck, Mrs. Glass (Diane Lane) doesn't cook (and what's that needle doing in her arm?). And Mr. Glass (Stellan Skarsgard) is letching after sis (LeeLee Sobieski), getting beat up by thugs, and yelling at Mrs. Glass. Meanwhile, younger brother Rhett (Trevor Morgan) is oblivious to the weirdness because of all the Nintendo crap the Glass's bought him. Dastardly hijinks ensue." As you can see (but please don't), "The Glass House" traffics in predictably decadent Hollywood clichés--the drug-addled mom, those conniving L.A. rich people, and the Ridgemont High meets "Beverly Hills 90210" surf 'n cell phone teen stereotype. Except that the teens in this flick look like 27-year-old B-actors that lied at their cattle calls. Leelee Sobieski actually plays a dissembling cheat, except that she comes off as a precocious, wise-cracking Helen Hunt knockoff, not a Valley girl from Encino. All this, of course, begs the usual question we've had of Hollywood for the past thirty years: why the HELL was this movie made? Too fulfill some perverse yearly quota of spooky foster parent flicks? Because of a high-priced studio analysis that showed a pressing demand in the "Buffy" demographic for a psychologically astute 16-year-old heroine, who penetrates to the Freudian evil at the heart of mom and dad's beautiful world? Or maybe it's more subtle--an L.A. insider story, where the epicenter of moral turpitude is the San Fernando Valley (home of our nation's porn industry), and the center of moral depravity is those Jag-driving, arugula-loving rich folk along the Pacific Coast Highway. Who knows, and, frankly, who cares. For a genre like this to work the premise has to be credible. I just never bought that two lifelong friends would suddenly turn on their former neighbors just to satiate their vacuous greed. To give depth to that premise, much more needed to be done to develop Erin Glass's thwarted hankering for love and family, only alluded to just before her morphine-induced suicide. That said, "The Glass House" does have a few sick and twisted moments, all centered around the always-compelling Stellan Skarsgard ("Good Will Hunting," "Breaking the Waves") as the knavish mastermind behind this unneighborly plot, who relentlessly mines the creepy Dad archetype for all its worth. Unfortunately, director Daniel Sackheim overplays his hand. A little more Hitchcockian subtlety, and less of the ham-fisted loan sharks and the loud telegraphed suspense music, and Mr. Glass's evil would not seem so obvious. Yet, no matter what fixes the filmmaker applied, "The Glass House" would still be an inappropriate and ineffective escape from the far more fearsome worries of the last few weeks. Once again, just as Hollywood tries desperately to manufacture hysteria, the real world's got it beat. |
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