The list of things that Battle of the Sexes isn’t really about is one longer than an Isner/Mahut game. For one, it’s not really about tennis. It’s also, in a funny way, not really about the battle or even the sexes. From directing duo Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, here is a film about lost souls on the margins of society and how they deal with the rough road that life has thrown their way. Fundamentally, this is a film about equality for all sectors of society and a reminder of just how far from over the struggle really is.
By the time the opening titles of Loving Vincent come to a close, and the film itself begins, somewhere in the region of 1500 hand painted oil canvases, produced by professional artists and animators over the equivalent of perhaps 15-20 months will have glanced and glimmered across the screen. The result is, simply put, astonishing.
There were two available avenues down which The Glass Castle, Destin Daniel Cretton’s adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ likewise-titled memoir, could have traveled. On the one hand, a ‘glass castle’ is symbolically suggestive of fragility, insecurity and hollow grandeur; on the other, it is a image that conjures nostalgic ideas of the fairytale ‘far, far away’s of childhood tales. In hindsight, it is a shame that Cretton leant to the latter. His Glass Castle is a film of many isolated successes, which are sadly let down a misjudged and inconsistent tone.
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