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Sixteen year-old Ruby Baker (Leelee Sobieski) and her 11-year old brother are orphaned when their
parents die in a car crash.
Following the last will and testament of the deceased Bakers, the children move in with their guardians, Erin and Terry Glass (Diane Lane and Stellan Skarsgard), trusted friends of their parents. The Glasses are a wealthy couple—she is a doctor, while he owns a transport company, and they live in a fabulous glass house in Malibu. These custodians, however, turn out to have other things in mind than the children's welfare. Known to the Glasses but unknown to the children, their thrifty parents have left them "enough to live comfortably for the rest of their lives"—four million dollars.
The Glass House is one of those oh-so-predictable movies, and you as viewer can be sure you're always three steps ahead of the plot. But you forgive the director because at least there's a story to follow, albeit portraying a rather worn-out theme; besides, the story is good enough to distract you from the movie's flaws (like the cheap thrills, the cut-and-dried characters, etc.). Cinematography is such that it succeeds in establishing a creepy mood through the clever use of light and shadows, although not spine-tingling enough to trigger a heart attack. Besides the music and the solid performances of Sobieski, Lane and Skarsgard, there is that fantastic goldfish bowl of a house heightening the element of suspense in the movie—you never know what's going to turn up next through those transparent walls. (The house is so beautiful you wonder who the architect is and what other buildings he has done).
Despite its general predictability and somewhat slow pacing at times, The Glass House
is still worth your time and money because it's different from most of the movies they're producing these days—it has no sex, no sci-fi, no fantasy, no starry-eyed romance, no smart-ass comedy—just a simple story that could happen to anyone in any town, portrayed by characters who could very well have been your neighbors. That is where its value lies—because it is reality-based, it can make the thinking viewer re
-examine the ever-present evils that threaten man: greed, covetousness, crass materialism, and that bad old-fashioned sin of Cain. Of course, the good wins over the
bad, as it should.
(Date reviewed: January 7, 2002)
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